The Washington Informer: Opinions/Editorials

But don’t be confused. It wasn’t because she and her feet were tired, that she refused to give up her seat on that Montgomery, Ala. bus that day. She felt that she deserved to sit, and why should she have to stand, so that a man–any color man–should be able to sit?

No. She wasn’t simply a tired, “colored” seamstress. She had been an NAACP member and officer since the 1940s. She helped raise money to defend the Scottsboro Boys against unjust charges that they had raped a White woman. She had received Civil Rights training at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee.

History too often maintained “that my feet were hurting and I didn’t know why I refused to stand up when they told me,” as she said in a speech in 1992. “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.”

She was a “revolution-in-waiting,” and she was the spiritual “Mother” if you will, of a courageous, but un-tested, 26-year-old Baptist preacher, just out of graduate school and a seminary in Boston, named Martin Luther King Jr.

What made the revolution she led so important was the solidarity and unity of the entire Black population of Montgomery, which absolutely refused to ride another bus for 380 days - until Montgomery authorities agreed to desegregate the buses and treat all passengers the same.

Black folks, who always took the “early bus”–so that they could be in the homes of the families they served when they arose each morning, to pour the coffee and the juice, to serve the breakfast, and clean the houses–it was those Black folks who walked and car-pooled because, like Parks, they were not just tired of standing on the bus, they were tired of the unjust Jim Crow system that required all Black people to stand, if just one White person wanted to sit.

Later, Parks marched in Selma, Alabama during the turbulent Civil Rights struggle there. She participated in the1963 March on Washington. In 1995, she was a speaker at the Million Man March. She remained true to her roots. She sparked our revolution.

She joined the ancestors Oct. 24, 2005. She was 92.

A few years after that movement was waged and won, and the flame of the Civil Rights Revolution was lit all across the Deep South, Parks had to leave Montgomery because she could not find any more work there. She moved to Detroit, where she got involved in the first Congressional campaign of John Conyers Jr., now the Dean of the Congressional Black Caucus.

Conyers describes her as, “humble, resolute, deeply religious,” a woman he said, who “never raised her voice,” and who had a “saint-like quality.” Conyers asked her, and she accepted a staff position in his Detroit office when he was first elected to Congress, and there she worked for more than 20 years.

Rosa Parks was the deserved recipient of the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian honor in this country. All of us are truly blessed to live in the time of this great woman, and her companions in Montgomery who surrounded her with strength and protection, and who, thanks to her courage, found the voice of the Civil Rights Revolution–Dr. King–in their midst.

Thank you Sister Rosa. You were the spark that started our Revolution. Thank you Sister Rosa Parks.