Remembering Rosa

I remember my father telling the story of riding a Greyhound bus from West Virginia to Virginia. He was a new navy recruit and on his way to a naval base. After crossing the stateline, the bus driver stopped to separate the blacks from the whites on board. My father had only heard of such nonsense from newspapers, but now he was witness to it. The decade was the 1950s, and the South was still segregated.

Just 50 years ago, Rosa Parks decided to change things in the segregated "Jim Crow" South. Strangely enough, it happened suddenly. On December 1, 1955, she sat alone in the white section of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. When whites boarded, she was asked to move but would not. That made all the difference. She was arrested, galvanizing African-Americans to action. The black community boycotted the bus system for 381 days until the Supreme Court ruled the Montgomery law unconstitutional. The boycott and the press coverage propelled an unknown black preacher named Martin Luther King, Jr. onto the national stage.

Other women had been arrested for not moving out of the white section on a bus. At least two other women had been arrested in 1955, but because their backgrounds were too risque, leaders at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) decided against using them as acceptable test cases in court. Now they had Rosa, a seamstress and a woman, but not a politician nor a public figure.

Rosa Parks died on October 24, 2005. She was 92 years old. She was honored in 1999 by President Bill Clinton who awarded her the Congressional Gold Medal. During the ceremony, President Clinton said that Rosa's short ride on that bus in 1955 took the civil rights movement a long way.

Where did Rosa Parks get her inner strength?

Her mother would scold her: "You'll be lynched before you're 20." So we know that Rosa always had a strong spirit.

She was not only a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) at the time she was arrested, and part-time secretary for the Montgomery NAACP; she had also already had some training in civil disobedience and peaceful integration at the Highlander Folk Center in Tennessee. This was the educational center for workers' rights and racial equality in our state. But in retrospect much later in her life, she said the resistance on the bus was simply caused because she was "tired of givng in."

She wasn't thinking about a revolution that evening on the bus. She said that instead "I was thinking about my husband, how he'd spent his day at the barber shop at Maxwell Air Force Base . . . . I was hoping he'd had a good day. I was thinking about my back aching and about the pretty sights and sounds of Christmas. I was thinking about how we were going to have a good time this Christmas, and everybody was going to be happy."

But then a white bus driver came to her, waving his hand and ordering her and others to move out of their seats. Rosa remembered that moment of decision this way: "I felt a determination cover my body like a quilt on a winter night. I felt all the meanness of every white driver I'd seen who'd been ugly to me and other black people through the years I'd known on the buses in Montgomery. I felt a light suddenly shine through the darkness."

This is what we call an epiphany, a revelation. And you have to be ready for it. Rosa was. She was ready not just because she had done the work of preparation at the Highlander Folk Center and at the NAACP, but also because she had in her a strong spirit that burned steadily. The epiphany for Rosa was Rosa. She let her inner light shine. That light in the darkness came from inside her and shone on the world. Our inner light is the greatest light of all, brighter than all the stage lights politicians and dramatists can manufacture. Limelight pales by comparison.

Remembering Rosa, we would do well to remind ourselves that we have a light burning inside. We are lights waiting to shine in the darkness.