he delivers them from the wicked and saves them,
because they take refuge in him.” Psalm 37:40
She was one of four African-Americans on a Montgomery, Alabama, city bus that day in December—December 1, 1955, one of four African-Americans who were seated in a section of the bus that was something of a twilight zone, a place blacks could sit as long as there weren’t too many white passengers.
Hard as it is to believe today, the front of the bus was reserved for white people; the back was for blacks. In much of the American South, Jim Crow was still the law of the land in 1955.
She’d been working all day at the department store, and she was tired—physically tired; but she was also spiritually tired, her soul bruised by the treatment of her people, treatment she understood and experienced ever since she was old enough to understand the parameters of the racial divide in world in which she lived.
She and her husband were members of the local NAACP, active in civil rights cases. What she did that day—when she refused to give up her seat to a white man simply because he was white—may well have been spur-of-the-moment, but it wasn’t without context. “I don’t think I should have to stand up,” she told the bus driver, who was trying to get her to move. She stayed put because "I would have to know for once and for all what rights I had as a human being and a citizen of Montgomery, Alabama." That’s what she told an interviewer a few months later. She knew what was at stake.
Her name was Rosa Parks, and, as I write, today she’ll be buried in Detroit, the city she called home since 1957. She goes to her grave as someone many call “the mother of racial integration” in America. Her story has become—and should be—as much an American myth as George Washington’s cherry-tree honesty or Ben Franklin’s penniless arrival in Philadelphia.
Three other African-Americans gave up their seats, in all likelihood, for good reasons—they stayed out of jail. A dozen white people didn’t think twice when she was removed from that bus. Maybe some of them never even looked up from their papers. None of them had any idea that race relations in their city and their nation were going to change, powered by a little lady’s refusal to leave her bus seat.
Few stories are as important in 20th century American history.
Today, at her funeral, Aretha Franklin will sing “How Great Thou Art,” Rosa Parks’s favorite hymn. It’s probably fair to say that most of America would join a choir today to sing those four words in tribute to Rose Parks—“Rosa, how great thou art.”
But Ms. Parks gave God all the raves. “I believe in church and my faith,” she wrote in Quiet Strength, “and that has helped to give me the strength and courage to live as I did.”
Last week Rose Parks died. Today she’ll be buried. But her life inspires millions. She’s a role model for racial justice, an authentic American hero, and a testimony to the truth of the words King David uses, as yet another promise, to end this long psalm about the comfort coming to those who seek shelter—as Rosa Parks did, in the bounty of God’s love.
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*Rosa Parks died on October 24th, 2005. This meditation, like most others on Sundays, is taken from Sixty at Sixty. . . I'm now 74.
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