Beacon of Hope; Rosa Parks: One Person Can Make a Difference
BEACON OF HOPE
Anyone who doubts that an individual can make a difference to the fate of a nation should consider the case of Rosa Parks, who died on Monday at the age of 92.
The date was December 1, 1955. The place: Montgomery, Alabama, which had briefly been the capital of the Confederacy and at mid century was home to 70,000 whites and 50,000 African-Americans. As with most of the South, Montgomery was ruled by Jim Crow, or racially segregated public accommodations, which extended to the city’s bus lines upon which African-Americans were especially dependent — restricted as they were to largely menial labor and not having sufficient means to own cars.
Mrs. Parks, then 42 years old, a bespectacled and quiet churchgoing woman who worked in a downtown department store as a seamstress, was riding a bus home during rush hour. When the bus became crowded and the driver called for "Niggers" to move to the back to make way for white riders, Mrs. Parks sat steadfast in her seat. Her feet hurt and she was tired. A member of the NAACP, she remembered the time 10 years earlier when she was thrown off a bus for refusing a similar order. It was time to make a stand, and she did so, in her own quiet and resolute way, by sitting tight.
That night, the woman who would not be moved launched a crusade that transformed the nation. Mrs. Parks was arrested and the local head of the NAACP, a Pullman porter named E.D. Nixon, sprang into action. Black citizens’ ensuing boycott of the Montgomery bus lines, which lasted more than a year, became the first mass movement of the civil-rights movement, which changed the nation’s complexion in every way.
The bus boycott brought the young Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. to the forefront of that movement. But it was the actions of ordinary people like Mrs. Parks that fostered the revolution. As one young black woman told a reporter at the time, "The Reverend King didn’t stir us up. We’ve been stirred up for a long time."
Mrs. Parks’s life was a testimony to the glory that this nation’s greatness ultimately rests in the lives of everyday people. Her willingness to defy brutal authority simply because she was too tired to submit to injustice any longer shines through the murk of these dark days; in life she was an example, a spark. In death, her memory is a beacon of hope.
From editorial, The Boston Phoenix
Anyone who doubts that an individual can make a difference to the fate of a nation should consider the case of Rosa Parks, who died on Monday at the age of 92.
The date was December 1, 1955. The place: Montgomery, Alabama, which had briefly been the capital of the Confederacy and at mid century was home to 70,000 whites and 50,000 African-Americans. As with most of the South, Montgomery was ruled by Jim Crow, or racially segregated public accommodations, which extended to the city’s bus lines upon which African-Americans were especially dependent — restricted as they were to largely menial labor and not having sufficient means to own cars.
Mrs. Parks, then 42 years old, a bespectacled and quiet churchgoing woman who worked in a downtown department store as a seamstress, was riding a bus home during rush hour. When the bus became crowded and the driver called for "Niggers" to move to the back to make way for white riders, Mrs. Parks sat steadfast in her seat. Her feet hurt and she was tired. A member of the NAACP, she remembered the time 10 years earlier when she was thrown off a bus for refusing a similar order. It was time to make a stand, and she did so, in her own quiet and resolute way, by sitting tight.
That night, the woman who would not be moved launched a crusade that transformed the nation. Mrs. Parks was arrested and the local head of the NAACP, a Pullman porter named E.D. Nixon, sprang into action. Black citizens’ ensuing boycott of the Montgomery bus lines, which lasted more than a year, became the first mass movement of the civil-rights movement, which changed the nation’s complexion in every way.
The bus boycott brought the young Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. to the forefront of that movement. But it was the actions of ordinary people like Mrs. Parks that fostered the revolution. As one young black woman told a reporter at the time, "The Reverend King didn’t stir us up. We’ve been stirred up for a long time."
Mrs. Parks’s life was a testimony to the glory that this nation’s greatness ultimately rests in the lives of everyday people. Her willingness to defy brutal authority simply because she was too tired to submit to injustice any longer shines through the murk of these dark days; in life she was an example, a spark. In death, her memory is a beacon of hope.
From editorial, The Boston Phoenix
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