Salute to Rosa Parks

Conservative Thoughts ^ | October 24, 2005 | John Kuethe

[Wrangler22]

Today I want to salute a great American and a true hero of American history. Yesterday I posted a piece on the racial hatred that seems to permeate our culture today. Rosa Parks stood up against the racial hatred of her time and inspired generations to work toward a more integrated society where all people are treated equally. We have not yet reached this point but we must keep working through peaceful means. Anger never resolved anything. Thank you Rosa Parks for your bravery and inspiration during a time when this Nation needed someone to stand up for fairness and equality.

[areafiftyone]

Rest in Peace Rosa Parks. A True American Hero!

[cyborg]

amazing lady

[Dawgreg]

She sure was. RIP.

[mistress_of_tantra]

Truly an American before her time and thank goodness for that! I can only hope that one day we see the world as she saw it, for it would be a true shame to forget all she did and all she wanted.

[slowry]

From Tammy Bruce's book, The New Thought Police:

Most Americans believe that the civil-rights struggle was full of serendipity, that it was a spontaneous grassroots movement of average people who wanted to make a difference and improve their lives. Rosa Parks, for example, has been portrayed as an Everywoman who happened to take the bus one day in 1955 and somehow crashed through the barriers of her ordinary, run-of-the-mill life by deciding not to relinquish her seat to a white man.

In truth, the Montgomery, Alabama, chapter of the NAACP had been looking for months for a test case to challenge bus segregation. For this, they needed a bus rider to be arrested so their challenge could move through the courts -- but it had to be the right sort of bus rider. In fact, Parks wasn't the first black to refuse to relinquish a seat to a white person. The first to personally challenge bus segregation earlier in 1955 had been 15-year-old Claudette Colvin, followed by another teenager named Mary Louise Smith. The NAACP leaders, however, didn't think that either of the girls would cut the right kind of figure in court.

Parks was a veteran activist and an officer of the Montgomery NAACP. In actuality, she wielded great power in the chapter; she was the one who had noticed Martin Luther King Jr. and asked him to join the executive committee. She was at the meeting where the Montgomery NAACP leaders considered the possibility of using Colvin or Smith as the test case.

In December of 1955, six weeks after the NAACP's rejection of the teenagers, Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat. Parks told Time magazine, "I did not get on the bus to get arrested. I got on the bus to go home." That may have been true for Colvin and Smith but certainly not for Parks. Rosa Parks was a "bus rider" the same way Betty Friedan was a "housewife."

[Fenris6]

"Thank you Rosa Parks for your bravery and inspiration during a time when this Nation needed someone to stand up for fairness and equality."

t o be fai, Rosa Parks was not the first or the only one to protest this policy - merely the one who got all the media attention.

[Wally_Kalbacken]

Perhaps that's true and the myth became legend - but I still have to respect her for the way she lived after the notoriety of that dignified act of civil disobedience. I don't thing she was selling Rosa Parks t-shirts or forming Rosa Parks, Inc. in the way the King family has been living by commercializing the legacy of MLK, Jr. Hat's off to her, anyway.

[cartoonistx]

[CLIQUE777]

I'm still wondering how more than 2,000 dead American soldiers in Iraq don't get the same treatment (lying in State)and acclaim as Rosa Parks. It seems each of them gave and did more for their country than she did. I believe the 19th century description was something like "...they gave the last full measure...".

[Wrangler22]

I agree.