The Back of the Bus

[filkertom]

On this date in 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white passenger. This sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott and, eventually, the Civil Rights movement.

We owe that woman a lot.

There's still so much work to do. But never look at the size of the task. Even the smallest first step... is the first step.

Comments

[markbernstein.livejournal.com]

A month or two back, I encountered a quote that I love. I'm not certain of the attribution, but at least one version is attributed to rapper Jay-Z:

"Rosa sat so Martin could walk. Martin walked so Barack could run. Barack ran so that we all could fly."

[janetmiles.livejournal.com]

An excellent quote. The version I heard was "Rosa sat so Martin could march. Martin marched so Barack could run. Barack is running so our children can fly."

[markbernstein.livejournal.com]

* nod * I've seen that one as well. I've also seen versions that use "Obama" instead of "Barack".

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

[capplor.livejournal.com]

It doesn't matter how that sentiment is expressed, It all happened during MY lifetime.

Interesting times indeed. Anybody up on guessing what happens next?

[selenesue.livejournal.com]

A Black Doctor Who, that's what. Here's the latest rumored contender for the part as of 2010, when David Tennant's run ends:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paterson_Joseph

Anything can happen! :-)

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

And boy howdy, is the racism coming out of the woodwork there! I saw a bingo card filled with direct quotes from various Dr. Who forums, and it was just disgusting.

[selenesue.livejournal.com]

Well, crap on a cracker. I bet these are the same buzzkills who did not approve of Mickey either. Or Ianto's girlfriend Lisa [OK, she wasn't born a Cyberman!] or The Runaway Bride's groom wots'is'name. Doctor Who has been studiedly concentrating on inter-racial relationships for years, where were they?

Thank Rassilon that there's something for black English actors to do besides #$%^&* Iago again! ::grin::

[fredhuggins.livejournal.com]

What's the big deal? We had a black Ford Prefect, didn't we?

[redaxe.livejournal.com]

I remember seeing another post, elsewhere, sometime in the last month or so, about Stonewall, and the need for confrontational action, and thinking that Rosa's action was exactly that sort of spark. She lit the fire under us, and the world exploded. I think we're ready for another spark or two and the resulting earth-shattering kabooms, even though there will certainly be some unfortunate collateral effects.

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

There was an argument I used to have regularly with my parents when I was still in college. It went like this:

Them: You can't change the world!
Me: No, but I can change the little part of it that touches me. And if enough of us do that, the world will change.

Even then, I knew that the answer to "it's too big a problem" was "so you take it one little bit at a time."

[bayushisan.livejournal.com]

I think a lot of people tend to forget that. If each person treated the people they encountered as they wanted to be treated I think you'd see a paradigm shift in a good way.

[gardnerhill.livejournal.com]

The awesomest thing about Rosa Parks' famous one-woman sit-down strike...was that it was planned and orchestrated by her and by Martin Luther King. This wasn't a random, tipping-point "and then black people accidentally got started on their march to freedom" thing.

Black people had been chucked off buses or arrested for years, decades. But Dr. King, with young Miss Parks' cooperation, knew that if a young, pretty, respectable church-going black woman (who would have been complimented as "a credit to her race" by whites) got cuffed and jailed for something so cruel and absurd, it would point out the whole cruel absurdity of the Jim Crow laws. (It's the same reason Susan B. Anthony, a respectable middle-aged spinster, insisted upon being jailed for attempting to vote, rather than let the cops set her free with the usual fine -- to draw media attention to the law rather than the lawbreaker.)

Doesn't make Miss Parks any less brave -- and it makes the history of the civil rights movement look less a matter of serendipity.

(Maybe some day we'll find out that the angry drag queens in Stonewall orchestrated the rebellion to take place the day after Judy Garland's funeral.)