Taking a Moment

I'm into history of the American struggle to live up to its ideals, todays news of the passing of Rosa Parks had a deep effect on me. My thoughts go back a several years when a group of friends and I had stumbled into the midst of someone's birthday party at the Elwood on Woodward. The party was for Rosa Parks. Being the only other party in the place we were invited to sing along, to wish her Happy Birthday, It was a defining moment in my life.

In 2003 I attended Ford Motor Companys 100th anniversary party in Dearborn, Michigan... Part of my job that weekend
was to be the ambassador for a group of 50 people I worked with in Toronto, as Detroit was my home town. We visted The Henry Ford Mueseum which recenty unvieled the bus Rosa Parks would ride into history. Everyone got a moment to sit in the seat she had occupied, as the mueseum dosant spoke of the place it had in history. I got my moment in the seat... there is a quality to being in a place of history that defies explanation. When my turn was over I moved to sit at the back of the bus for the rest of the tour, I was humbled in the moment and it seemed like the right thing to do.

The following are xcerpts from todays Detroit Free Press and Free Press Blog:

A tiny woman with a quiet voice delivered a message worldwide
October 25, 2005

BY ROCHELLE RILEY

Her simple action on Dec.1, 1955 -- refusing to give in, to shuffle, to wearily accept that place lower than whites on a social ladder -- might have been her path to glory. But she wasn't after glory. She was after equality. And her simple action was a reminder that revolutions begin in single moments. "Our mistreatment was just not right, and I was tired of it," Parks wrote in her 1994 book "Quiet Strength." "I kept thinking about my mother and my grandparents, and how strong they were," she wrote. "I knew there was a possibility of being mistreated, but an opportunity was being given to me to do what I had asked of others." Her arrest and trial led to a 381-day bus boycott that led to the desegregation of buses and trains across the South. Her name became history when the Supreme Court ruled in 1956 that segregated transportation violated the U.S. Constitution. So many laws violated the constitution in the 1940s and '50s that the Constitution itself lived as a shell of what the Founding Fathers had written.

It took a petite woman of 42 to remind America of what a roomful of men had signed.

As the mother of the civil rights movement, she set the tone for quiet refusal to accept the status quo and her action would pave the way for a nonviolent movement that would elevate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to status as icon. Parks was a complex woman who understood the plight of her race. She had more heart and courage and compassion for the circumstances that have led to the black condition in poor neighborhoods in cities across the country than other black people could admit then or now. That compassion was evident in August 1994, after a would-be young thief attacked her in her own house. In a later account of the incident, she wrote "I pray for this young man and the conditions in our country that have made him this way."
I can't forget her concern for that young man. I love her ability to see the place that birthed his anger. Rosa Parks helped change the world in a quiet moment nearly 50 years ago. But her revolution hasn't ended. Her greatest legacy can be found in the minds of young teens who don't know the names Julian Bond and Andrew Young, who barely know Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman. But they know Rosa Parks. Rosa was synonymous with freedom.

Freedom has become such an all-encompassing word that covers an ideal greater for the whole than is greater than the one. But in the 1950s and '60s, black Americans counted their freedoms in the daily things they could not do because of the color of their skin: use the nearest bathroom, sit at a lunch counter, drink from a "white" water fountain, shop in a lovely store, attend a good school. When Rosa Parks refused to stand, she actually stood for a shift in the movement, which rose to another level from that quiet moment.

Every warrior who fought for change, who struggled for all people to be treated the same, deserves a place in history, deserves to have their name remembered. Rosa Parks didn't find a place in history. She created one. She became that moment. Where have all our flowers gone? Where are the Rosa Parkses who can refuse continued bigotry and discrimination now?

Colin L. Powell: 'America has lost a great lady' Posted 12:50 p.m.

"America has lost a great lady and a great fighter for freedom. All of us who have benefited from the civil rights revolution owe her a debt of gratitude. By sitting on a bus she forced America to look at itself and realize it was an ugly picture that needed to change. Change came slowly, but it would not have come at all without her singular act of courage. We must continue to seek equality for all Americans if we are to be faithful to the legacy of Rosa Parks."
-- Colin L. Powell, former Secretary of State

Museum to drape historic bus in black Posted 8:49 a.m.

The Henry Ford is celebrating the legacy of Rosa Parks by draping in black crepe the 36-passenger bus on which Parks began the civil rights movement. The Montgomery, Ala., bus where the civil rights pioneer refused to give up her seat to a white man in 1955 will sit in The Henry Ford's center plaza with the black crepe, said William Pretzer, curator of political history.
"We invite people to come in, take a seat on the bus, and then we make a presentation about an extraordinary event on a very ordinary bus," said Pretzer, who was instrumental in acquiring the run-down bus for $492,000 in 2001. The General Motors bus, made with tens of thousands of others in Pontiac, was restored with a $300,000 federal grant by using parts from other 1948 buses.