For MLK Day* -- Rosa Parks

Yesterday, our pastor brought Martin Luther King into the sermon in a laudatory way, and rightly so. However, white churches need to be reminded of how much MLK was hated in 1968 by church-going white people. He was. In King's honor, on this his holiday, I'll offer these thoughts of mine posted here eight years ago. 

One can only imagine how annoyed white folks were on the bus that afternoon. After all, it was the end of another working day and nobody was making all that much money. They were all tired and weary, and a bunch of them had no idea what was on tap for supper--they'd still have to figure it out once they got home. "Get out of work and get on the bus and get home and put your feet up," was just about all there was to it that afternoon, 60 years ago, in Montgomery.

I'm betting no one even saw her get on, none of the white folks anyway. Why should they notice such things? They were busy too, had their own heartaches, they're own crappy stories. They didn't need anybody else's problems that late afternoon. 

Some of them didn't even like the blasted driver. He had a history of pissing people off--black people especially. Some people just got airs, you know? Some people aren't content with having it their way; they just want to do nothing more than poke a sharp stick in the eye of someone else, like that black lady especially. She wasn't breaking any law sitting in the middle section. The whole world knew it was "first come, first served." Stupid driver.

And, sure, it would have been right for that white guy to just give up the seat that lady had. After all, he was younger and she had a hard day too that day. I mean, you could see it on her face. She was beat, and he didn't have to make a point of lording it over her the way he did. The way most of the people on the bus saw it that morning, there wouldn't have had to be a dust-up at all. The whole mess simply wouldn't have had to happen.

She could have moved too. The other Negros sitting beside her had moved after all, when that white trash bus driver commanded them to. And he didn't have to speak that way either, truth be told. He could have just said it kindly, not screamed. He's an ass really, and I don't mind saying it. That driver is an ass. He bears a whole ton of responsibility for the whole bus boycott thing. Why can't we all just get along?

*  ~  *  ~  *  ~  *

We've made a hero out of Rosa Parks, even a Christian hero. People today, 60 years later, say she emitted some kind of "Christian glow" so present and so moving even white people in Alabama saw it, a kind of divine aura. Even if that's fantasy, it makes little difference because she's become what we've made of her, a saint. Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a younger white man and thereby broke the back of certain kind of segregation in the Jim Crow South. 

She did it alone. She did it without violence. She did it without saying much at all. But she did it, took it upon herself to stand up for justice she saw violated every day of her life. That day, 60 years ago, she simply told herself and that white passenger that she wasn't going to take it anymore, and when that jackass bus driver insisted, so did she. She insisted on staying right there where she was. 

And that's what started it.

Sometimes white people like me don't realize or remember what a bother she must have been, what a squeaky wheel, what an "agitator," my father's favorite word for Dr. Martin Luther King. Before my father died, I should have asked him whether he'd ever changed his mind about MLK; it would have been a tough question, I'm sure, one he wouldn't have wanted to answer. 

He saw King as someone who just upset things, got people are riled up, raised cane, made trouble, put things off track when all any of us wanted was to make a living and provide for our families. What's the crime in that? My father didn't want to be bothered by black people's problems, dang it!--he had his own. Turn on the news and what do you see but people in the streets when they ought to be at work. That sort of thing.

To lets of white folks, "Black Lives Matter" gets tiring, doesn't it? Sometimes you just want to tell 'em all to go get a job somewhere, to go home and make a family or something, make something of yourself.

It's such a bother, such a mess. This is America, land of the free, home of the brave, a Christian nation. 

Sometimes our adoration of heroes makes it too easy to forget what made them heroic.