[ThinkSouth] Rosa Parks: A real progressive

[Andy Brack]

The Monday death Alabama civil rights icon Rosa Parks at age 92 is a visible reminder of two things: the courage and spirit of one woman's action that finally led a nation to change and an immediate reminder that there appear to be few leaders today with the passion to continue to push for progressive civil rights changes.

Mrs. Parks' death brought worldwide editorial plaudits about her legacy from a 1955 bus trip in Birmingham. The Independent of London called her an American hero:

Her arrest gripped the country's imagination and galvanised the emerging civil rights movement.

The Christian Science Monitor called her "immovable:"

After her arrest, Parks was fired from her job, but she took up work as a dispatcher of private vehicles during the bus boycott, and travelled and spoke on behalf of civil rights - this despite frequent death threats. The world needs individuals to heed the inner voice of dignity and freedom when it calls, and to act on it and carry it forward as Parks did. But they must have the support of likeminded people around them. The Parks story shows how vital that is.

In a gripping piece in The Nation, writer John O'Neill outlined why it was important that Mrs. Parks received the nation's highest civilian honor -- just as George Washington was the first to get it:

It was not merely appropriate that Rosa Parks receive the same recognition as George Washington had been accorded. It was essential, for without Parks and those who joined her in forging the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, Washington's promise of freedom would have remained forever constricted by the overt chains of slavery and the covert chains of segregation.

P.S. Guess what was said Tuesday in the newspaper in the town where all the civil rights commotion came to a head? Not a word on the Tuesday editorial page of The Birmingham News, although it did carry a long news story about her death.

--
Posted by Andy Brack to ThinkSouth at 10/25/2005 09:23:00 PM