Rosa Parks

It's been too long since I attended college so I forget the guy's name right now. He was a tall, sharp fellow who served with me at the campus Amnesty International group and we took some political science and international relations classes together.

One day we were discussing civil rights and all and I mentioned the Montgomery bus boycott which set off the modern movement. It started, I said, when Rosa Parks refused to get up and give her seat to a white man, as was required by law. He looked at me. "She had to do what?", he asked. I took some time to explain the system.

Under the law, I told him, whites filled the bus from the front to the back. Blacks filled the bus from the back to the front. When the two groups met in the middle, any subsequent white rider could demand the seat of a black rider. Rosa Parks simply refused to give up her seat. She was tired after a hard day's work and simply wanted to sit. For that, she was arrested and the bus boycott began.

My friend listened, then thought for a minute. Then he floored me. "Are you sure that happened? Where did you read this?", he asked.

This is like asking for documentation of Pearl Harbor.

"Why in the world do you ask that?", I shot back. "It was in all the papers. Trust me. I'll show you where you can look it up."

"Well", he said, "I just can't see that happening. I couldn't imagine getting on a city bus and telling a black person to get up and give me their seat. If I did that on a city bus going home I'd probably get my butt kicked. It just seems odd, that's all."

First off, the poor soul was clearly a product of a poor educational system which teaches him how to pledge to the flag but little about what went on to make the pledge more than just a flowery saying. We could have stuck with "... with Liberty, except for riders of the Montgomery bus system, and Justice, except for blacks everywhere in the South and a helluva lotta places up North and out West ..." but it just didn't rhyme. That's what made Rosa famous.

Second, it explains why there's so little understanding of the civil rights struggle today. It's hard to imagine the world we left behind. It seems surreal, like a bad science fiction novel. But it's real to me.

In the mid-'60s a white woman took my mother's seat as my family traveled by train through Texas, after my mother got up to get food or go to the restroom. Under state law, the white woman was entitled to it. But the rail system was under federal jurisdiction so the idiotic state laws didn't apply. I remember the hooting and hollering, and the white lady sitting quietly but firm before the conductor led her away.

(This is a -big- reason why traditional conservative hate-the-feds philosophy doesn't ring for African Americans. In our view, the feds act as a brake on the states as much as the other way around.)

I suppose as people like Parks dies away, and as kids like me grow up and pass on too, that the memories will be lost and we can finally move on. Some would argue that this will be a good thing. Memories like that, they say, simply reinforce arguments over who did what to who, and who is entitled to what, and which rights apply and on and on. But they miss the larger point that the end of Jim Crow was truly one of the great events in American history, and proves the underlying strength and value of the American system.

The sad part is, folks like my college friend will never see that as it played out through and after Rosa Parks. It's their loss.