Rosa Parks

I've always had an excellent memory for trivial experiences. The time we all dared eachother to kick some poor guy's freshly washed two-seater sports car on the way to school in 1966. Oh sure. I can recreate the whole conversation word for word. Every little detail.

For the record, I was the only kid who kicked the car. Well, that's because I was the only kid who didn't notice that the guy who'd just washed the car was still standing there in his driveway washing his other sports car.

He was some kind of a car nut, I guess. Thank goodness my foot wasn't big enough to leave a dent.

You would think, because I remember all these silly details from my childhood, I would remember some of the big important events from the 60's, but I don't. Neil Armstrong stepping on the Moon? Nope. Sorry. I don't remember that. I remember maybe twenty minutes later when Neil Armstrong and that other guy were putting the flag on the Moon, and they had to use something that looked like a jackhammer to drill a hole for the flag.

I thought to myself "The Moon is made out of rock?! In the cartoons it always looks so soft, like you could poke your finger into it."

Anyway, the one historic event that I remember clearly was Martin Luther King's murder on April 4th, 1968. I remember when I came home from school, the TV was turned on, and instead of the usual TV shows, there were news reports about this guy Martin Luther King, who'd been assasinated.

I can remember sitting there and watching the news on TV and not making heads or tails out of what anybody was saying. The only people I'd heard of being assasinated were Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy, and they were presidents. "But I thought you had to be president to be assasinated," I thought to myself.

Then I decided that when the newscaster was saying "Martin Luther King," he must mean "Martin Luther, the King."

"Well, if presidents can be assasinated," I reasoned, "I guess kings can be assasinated too. But we don't have kings in America. George Washington and Patrick Henry and all those guys, they had the Revolutionary War, and the King had to move back to England."

So then I asked my mom to explain what I was seeing on the news, and she started talking to me about some poor lady who had to ride on the back of the bus.

The bus?! What did the bus have to do with anything?

"Well, the people in Alabama made Rosa Parks ride on the back of the bus because she was Black. In those days, all the Black people had to ride in the back of the bus, and Martin Luther King stood up for this lady and he said 'That's not right that Black people should have to ride on the back of the bus. We pay the same bus fare as everybody else.'"

"Why was this lady black? Did something happen to her?"

"No, she was just Black. She was a Black person."

Then my mom had to explain to me what a Black person was. Of course, I'd seen Black people all my life, and Chinese people and Filipinos and all kinds of people, but I had no concept of ethnicity. I remember being utterly astonished at the idea that Rosa Parks and those other Black people had to ride in the back of the bus just because they had dark skin.

So then Mom continued with the bus story: "And when they wouldn't let the Black people ride in the front of the bus with everybody else, the Black people said 'OK, then we just won't ride the bus at all anymore.'"

From that day, I had this idea of Rosa Parks as the person who ignited, almost accidentally, the modern civil rights movement, and that's the Rosa Parks who you're reading about in obituaries and tributes and so forth, but that's really only part of her significance, if you ask me. And maybe not the most important part.

Rosa Parks was a regular person, an ordinary person. To me, that's the important thing about Rosa Parks. She didn't have a college degree. She didn't have wealth. She didn't get on that bus wearing a Chanel suit and a Cartier watch.

She was a regular person who changed history because she had the courage to confront injustice, in a very direct way, in a way that put her in very real danger. She had nothing but her courage and her belief in what was right. And look how far she got with just that.

Look around at the injustices in the world today. The big injustices and the little ones, the Enron-level corporate crime and the little invisible crimes against children that happen every day. Who's going to fix those problems? I don't think it's going to be the people our culture idolizes, the glamorous and the rich. I think it's going to be people like Rosa Parks.

If there's enough of us ordinary people with the kind of courage that Rosa Parks had and that kind of faith in the cause of righteousness, think of what we can do. Think how far we can go with just that.

Kurt "big daddy" True
25 october 2005