In one of those amazing coincidences in life, Rosa Parks came up in a conversation around the dinner table one night last week, in the context of explaining to my kids about how one person can be the cause of tremendous change in the world. My wife wondered if she was still alive, and I said I believed she was.
Her obituary was in the next day's paper, having died perhaps right around the time we were pondering her legacy.
There are people in life known for accomplishments that take hours, days, months, years or even a lifetime, and then there are those who have caused tremendous change -- for better or worse -- with a single act. Rosa Parks spent her life furthering the civil rights movement but she will best be known for an event that unfolded in a matter of minutes and the night she spent in jail because of it.
It has been said by some detractors that Rosa never meant to become an icon, that she refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man for no better reason than being tired. That's hard to believe, especially when the consequences she faced began to materialize. More likely she was sick and tired of being treated like a second-class passenger although she paid the same fare as the white racist who felt better entitled to her seat. Most likely she was thinking not of herself but of thousands of others humiliated by such bigotry before her and millions of others after her who needed to be spared that indignity.
We have tended to refer to such historical figures as Parks and Martin Luther King and others as great African Americans or pivotal figures in black history, but in truth they are American heroes --people who made our country better for all by awakening our conscience. Obstructing racism is God's work, and it benefits not only the victims, but the perpetrartors as well.
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