Rosa Parks, 1955. Source: Ebony Magazine.
As part of my ongoing plan to learn about a new topic every week, this week I’m reading about Rosa Parks.
(By the way, last week concluded my week(s) of learning about the military. Although I picked up lots of interesting bits and pieces, the main thing I learned is that it’s a huge topic and I need to choose a more specific aspect next time.)
Rosa Parks is an icon in the U.S., and the trouble with being an icon is that people only remember you for that one, iconic aspect. I wanted to dig a little deeper.
In the case of Ms. Parks, her legend was born on December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, when she refused to give up her seat on a bus for a white passenger, as required by law. She spent a day in jail before she was bailed out. The incident sparked a year-long bus boycott in the city and elsewhere, and was a major force in the larger civil rights movements.
A few things I didn’t know about Ms. Parks:
- She was forty-two years old at the time. For some reason, I’d pictured her being younger. Also, the geeky side of me thinks that’s pretty cool.
- She cited her Christian faith, as well as her church (African Methodist Episcopal), as a major source of strength. Although I’m an agnostic (and functionally an atheist), I could never be one of those militant atheists like Richard Dawkins who seem to despise religion. Christianity has done too much good for that. (And yeah, I know Douglas Adams falls into that religion-despising category too. The universe is made out of irony.)
- The refusal to give up her seat was not a pre-planned act. She was not expecting to make history or start a movement. She was simply tired of being treated as a second-class citizen.
- Her husband, Raymond Parks, was also strongly involved in the civil rights movement. He worked to help free the Scottsboro Boys in the 1930s.
- In 1994, at the age of 81, she was robbed and attacked in her home by a drug addict. He got 15 years in prison. She wrote a year later that she prayed for the man, and urged people not to read too much into the attack.
This quote of hers struck me in particular:
There were other people on the bus whom I knew. But when I was arrested, not one of them came to my defense. I felt very much alone. One man who knew me did not even go by my house to tell my husband I had been arrested. Everyone just went on their way.
Here’s to those who do what’s necessary, especially when they do it alone.
Have you ever been in a situation like hers? How did you handle it?
Brian D. Buckley 