Rosa Parks, the woman who refused to give up her seat in accordance with a racist law, has passed away. She was 92 years old. One of the most saddening things about her passing–at least to me–is that there are still so many young people today who have no idea who she is, or how significant her refusal to submit to an unjust law was to the Civil Rights movement.
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Rest in peace. She was one of my first civil rights heroes, and will always be so.
Claudette Colvin is still alive, though. Her life and her courage are worth celebrating now, more so as they were not at the time.
A great lady. Some people impact society with long periods of effort, or by leading great forces. But Rosa Parks did it in one brave, bright shining moment with a few quiet words.
Those words that Parks said, though, were at least 30 or so years in the making. The LA Times obit mentioned an incident when Parks was 10, where she faced off against a racist. Her quote, was in the article, that she felt she had a strong sense of what justice was, since she was small.
I didn’t know that she spent time in the Highlander School. Some folks in the UU church here were there in the 1960s.
A lot of those moments. Park’s refusal to give up her seat. Brown vs the Board of Education. The sit ins were culminations of years of tireless dedication, courage and effort by a people to liberate themselves from America’s brand of legalized aparteid. Men, women and children all played a role, and many died or were imprisoned for their efforts by domestic terrorists, many of whom ran the governments and policed the streets in the South.
What’s also sad is that so much of the civil rights era work was left undone., b/c for one thing, there was so much to do to dismantle racism and its roots that sprouted in the creation of this country from the time the Europeans first came on the continent as well as the 200 years that followed the creation of the US, as a country. When headway was made, accomplishments and gains were rolled back. Part of the two steps forward, one step back thing.
And the Civil Rights Movement which is still ongoing has been pasturized so much in the history books to become more palatable, that it’s been in danger of losing its life and vigor. That’s why in some part, I think why younger generations feel disconnected from it. When I grew up, it was just an outline of events, a snippit in the timeline of history. The violence, the terror and the courage which caused people to fight back, nonviolently was missing. That’s an important legacy for the people today, abeit one that those who still hold positions of power DON’T want young people to embrace, even while at the same time these leaders say words of praise about one of the Civil Rights Movement’s heroines who though committed and vibrant to her people until her nineties has been relegated largely to the past.
That’s why imo, it’s so important to have first-hand written and oral accounts of what happened, and to pass those down from one generation to the next. Because even the younger participants are middle-aged now.
“Pasturized” is definitely the right word for it. :(