What Rosa Parks Taught Me

Rosa Parks: American Hero

As we celebrate Black History Month, I find myself thinking about the movement hero, Rosa Parks, and the important differences between what I learned about her in school and the powerful lessons held by her true story.

I remember being taught that she wasn’t politicized or radical, she wasn’t an organizer or an agitator, she was just too tired at the end of a long day to get up and move to the back of the bus. The lesson was implicit: don’t agitate, don’t organize, be patient and change will come.

But that’s not the story of Rosa Parks. The real Rosa Parks was a militant activist in the civil rights movement and a community leader in her own right. Despite being depicted as a tired old seamstress, in her own words, “the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.” She was a woman of conviction whose brave stand was done without any great expectation, but with the belief that we all have a moral duty to resist oppression. Following her arrest, she worked in solidarity with her neighbors to do the impossible, organizing a mutual aid based mass transit system for all the Black residents of Birmingham.

Without Black riders, the city buses faced bankruptcy and had no choice but to desegregate.

Rosa Parks is an American hero who set an example I look to every day. She showed us that when we organize in solidarity, the unimaginable becomes the inevitable. Or, as another hero of mine put it, "el pueblo unido, jamás será vencido". Her example joins that of the other great leaders of the Civil Rights movement to show that it's right to feel a righteous rage when faced with injustice, and that it's good and just to resist oppression in all its forms.

That’s why, as we honor the memory of Rosa Parks, the Rev Dr King, and all the great heroes of the Civil Rights Movement, we must also thank those who keep their legacy alive. By kneeling when others demanded they stand, by pronouncing the simple truth, that Black Lives Matter, while being shouted down as divisive, and most of all, by organizing in the spirit of solidarity, to assure that the moral arc of the universe continues to bend toward justice.

Because as Frederick Douglas taught us, “Power concedes nothing without a demand, it never has and it never will.”