Conversation Point

In This Moment

Remembering Rosa Parks

Rosa Parks died last night at her home in Detroit,Michigan. At 92, Mrs. Parks passed on just shy of celebrating with us the fiftieth anniversary of her small act of defiance that literally changed the world. On December 1, 1955, Parks refused to give up her seat on that bus in Montgomery, Alabama, after a long day of work as a seamstress. Jim Crow laws, in place since Reconstruction after the end f the Civil War almost one hundred years earlier, dictated that she give up her seat if a white person wanted it. But on that day, Rosa Parks said no. Contrary to some histories that say her feet were hurting her and she didn't know why she refused to stand up when she was told, she was very clear about her actions. "But the real reason of my not standing up was I felt that I had a right to be treated as any other passenger. We had endured that kind of treatment for too long" Arrested, fingerprinted and fined, Mrs. Parks changed the world, but her own life was disrupted first. Encouraged by her husband, Raymond, she was already an active member of the NAACP, which was a dangerous thing to be in that time and place. This, coupled with termination from her job, an inability to find new work, and threats made against her, sent her and Raymond north in 1957 to Detroit to begin a new life.

But before she left Alabama, Parks participated in the 381 day Montgomery bus boycott, which only ended on December 26, 1956 when the Supreme Court ruled that segregated seating was unconstitutional. This was the action, organized by a then unknown preacher by the name of Martin Luther King, Jr., the action that initiated the modern civil rights movement. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 followed. Although Rev. King, Malcolm X, Medgar Evers and many others did not live to see the changes their efforts created, she did. She was also concerned that young people today, having ignored or brushed aside the historical battles waged to bring civil rights to its present point, take for granted what others paid a dear price to provide for their future. The woman known as the "mother of the civil rights movement" had good reason to call all of us to task, inclusive of all ethnic origin and race in the United states, to take stock of our expectations of ourselves and each other as people in the process of continuing to create a country with liberty and justice for all people.

Mrs. Parks, although rightfully known as the mother of the civil rights movement, was also aunt to thirteen nieces and nephews. "She wasn't the mother of the civil rights movement to me," Susan McCauley, one of her nieces, said las year. "She was the woman I wanted to become." Of all the tributes that are already pouring in, and the many more to come, I like this one best. Ms. McCauley holds dear the relational intimacy of family, of knowing and being loved by another in such a way as to embody this bond in one's own future growth and development. Those boundaries of their relationship are maintained, respected and cherished. But Ms. McCauley also reflects back the success of her goal to emulate her beloved aunt, and challenges us to do the same. We did not know Rosa Parks personally, but we did know her public courage, and there is a lot to consider that we can carry with us, and carry on in her name. In her one small act of defiance, Rosa Parks embodied these words from the prophet Isaiah, that we may also receive them: "Is this not the fast that I choose, to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?" (Isaiah 58:6)

Our legacy from Rosa Parks will only be measurable in our own small acts of defiance against the remaining political, social and economic structures that continue to divide and conquer humanity by criteria defined by ignorance, hatred and anything else disconnected from God's love for all of us. Later in life Mrs. Parks work focused on teaching the next generations how to use their history to create responsible leadership choices, which, all in all, are equally powerful acts of defiance, a clear statement against the way things were, and a step forward into making things how they can be.

The Montgomery, Alabama, city bus on which Rosa Parks said no, is now on display at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. For those of us who remember television coverage of civil rights demonstrators being hosed down by police, it is a touchstone, a sacred place, of a turning point in time. For those of you who do not remember those times, the mother of the civil rights movement is reminding you, one more time, to look at this bus and never forget what was, and what can be.

Until next time, God's blessings.

posted by Cory L. Kemp @ 10:29 PM