[Sent 1 December 2020 to my wife and our three daughters]
Greetings. You may have seen a news highlight that on this day 65 years ago the 42 year-old Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery for refusing to give up her seat to a man for whom there was no seat in the bus’s front ten rows designated for ‘White’ riders. The driver told the four African-American riders in the first row of the ‘Colored’ section of seats to stand. Three obeyed. Rosa Parks -- weary from the day’s work as a seamstress at the Montgomery Fair department store. . . . but more so from decades of ‘Jim Crow’ humiliations – did not.
As she later clarified,
“I was not tired physically. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in”.
The bus driver was not surprised. For a dozen years, Rosa Parks had bristled against the demeaning segregation he enforced when she had to ride his bus to/from work. Two policemen took her to jail, igniting within hours the Montgomery Bus Boycott for which the 26 year-old Martin Luther King, Jr. was recruited to lead.
The local NAACP – for which she and her husband were members, she being the secretary – had found the plaintiff needed to test segregation laws in court. Rosa Parks was honest, diligent, respected, reflective, resolved, dignified, courageous. She lost her job. She retained her integrity. She became “the mother of the Civil Rights Movement”.
You may have been too young to remember seeing Rosa Parks sitting quietly on the speakers’ platform for the 4 July 1991 opening of the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, a facility that merges with the Lorraine Motel where Dr. King was assassinated. Mom and I decided to take you with us to the ceremony. We were among the very few Caucasian attendees in the large emotional crowd. The ceremony closed with singing “We shall overcome”. When we were all instructed to cross our arms and hold hands, I vividly recall turning to the seasoned African American lady to my left. We did not know each other. Our eyes met. Our hands squeezed together. We paused. Then we began to sing with the crowd.
I suspect this lady is still singing if she is with us. I remind myself each day to keep singing – at times with anticipation . . . at other times wearily . . . at other times anxiously – but singing nonetheless “We shall overcome” poverty, prejudice, exploitation, ignorance, selfishness, cruelty, sloth, hate, indifference and instead become communities striving sacrificially for everyone residing among us to begin life with hope, live life with fervor, and end life with dignity.
Be safe. And keep singing!
Doug/Dad
