a day to remember this heroic person. to give thanks for her unbelievable courage and grace...a true agent of the Kingdom coming. here's a small excerpt from the NY Times obit.Rosa Parks, a black seamstress whose refusal to relinquish her seat to a white man on a city bus in Montgomery, Ala., almost 50 years ago grew into a mythic event that helped touch off the civil rights movement of the 1950's and 1960's, died yesterday at her home in Detroit. She was 92 years old.
For her act of defiance, Mrs. Parks was arrested, convicted of violating the segregation laws and fined $10, plus $4 in court fees. In response, blacks in Montgomery boycotted the buses for nearly 13 months while mounting a successful Supreme Court challenge to the Jim Crow law that enforced their second-class status on the public bus system.
The events that began on that bus in the winter of 1955 captivated the nation and transformed a 26-year-old preacher named Martin Luther King Jr. into a major civil rights leader. It was Dr. King, the new pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, who was drafted to head the Montgomery Improvement Association, the organization formed to direct the nascent civil rights struggle.
full obit from the NY Times here
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It's been remarkable and moving to watch the reaction of Americans to the death of Momma Rosa. As I was listening and watching some of the news stories about her, it struck me that she is a household name. Everyone who goes through 5th grade learns about Momma Rosa and her world-changing courage, yet we always read of her as an historical figure, often overlooking the simple fact that she was alive! The changes she fomented are incredibly recent and ongoing, and that's something that history classes don't emphasize enough. If children learned about this woman who is alive today and who wrought indelible changes in American society it would take on such greater meaning than reading a quick blurb about a woman who wouldn't stand up. She's real, she's recent, she's our grandmother.
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