Remembering Rosa Parks
January 18, 2010
by Contributor
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In examining almost any important historical event or movement, one can find a brave often under credited woman at the heart of it. So in this spirit, on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day, we honor and remember Rosa Parks as one of the most important sparks that led to the birth of the civil rights movement.
Our country has seen as many different types of protest as it has seen reasons for protest. However Rosa Parks has always been particularly inspiring to me because of her brave, dignified, determined style. I still remember the childlike awe with which I regarded the Rosa Parks story the first time I heard it in the second grade. As a shy child who would run home and hide in a tree if anyone looked sharply at me or heaven forbid raised their voice to me, Rosa Parks’s simple but unimaginably brave refusal to give up her seat on a bus was to me, a story of an epic heroine.
As children will do, I put her story in my own context by imagining what it would be like to stand up to school bus bullies and refuse to move the next time one of them wanted my breezy seat by the window on a stifling August day in Texas. I never worked up the nerve to do it. But as an adult, I understand more fully the scope of the courage required for a black woman to take such a stand in 1955. So today I remember and honor Rosa Parks, the tiny stoic woman, who sparked a movement that forever changed our country with her simple act of quiet defiance.
Rosa Louise Parks was nationally recognized as the “mother of the modern day civil rights movement” in America. Her refusal to surrender her seat to a white male passenger on a Montgomery, Alabama bus, December 1, 1955, triggered a wave of protest December 5, 1955 that reverberated throughout the United States. Her quiet courageous act changed America, its view of black people and redirected the course of history.
Way to go TNA, every important date involves an important, under-recognized woman /(women)
thanks Thia, for posting on Rosa Parks.
there is another under recognized female who did not give up her her seat way before the civil rights movement. Ida B. Wells, 1862-1931, would not leave a first class ladies’ car on a Memphis railway and rose to lead the nation’s first campaign against lynching.
Thanks Marille, she is indeed a fascinating under recognized woman! Others can read more about her here if you’re interested.
The stories of these two women seems to imply that women take the most dangerous risk by being first to test the waters of a controversial issue risks and if and when it ignites people to action, the men quickly come in and take over and are recognized for their courage and vision!
IMO, the truest and most couragous vision is the one who sees it first!
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