NEWS: Rosa Parks

Rosa, may we find inspiration in the story of your simple courage...


Her simple but inspiringly brave refusal to give up her seat to a white man on a public bus in Montgomery, Ala., 50 years ago brought about one of the great steps forward in American history, the civil rights movement.

The liberation of humankind from prejudice, racism, hate, and resentment is an ongoing process. In the American civil rights movement, religious individuals have always had a leadership role. This is a natural outgrowth of one's spiritual development, I believe. What's helped me in my own spiritual growth is the desire to more fully realize the standard we read about in the Bible, when God looked on His creation, male and female, and pronounced it "very good" (Gen. 1:31). (Reported in The Christian Science Monitor. http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1104/p18s01-hfcs.html)


It was Dec. 1, 1955. It was also light-years ago in American history, when, on a bus in Montgomery, Ala., Rosa Parks refused to give up her own bus seat to a white man.

“I felt that we as a people had endured far too long,” she said.

What she did broke the law. Then Rosa Parks broke “Jim Crow America” wide open.

“She is properly thought of as the mother of the civil rights movement,” says NAACP Chairman Julian Bond, “because when she sat down, she really stood up for all the rest of us.”

And when Martin Luther King Jr. learned she’d been arrested, he launched a boycott of all the buses in Montgomery.
(Reported in MSNBC http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9817878/)


Good bye, Rosa. Thank you.


MORE:
http://www.caribworldradio.com/cms/publish/article_1220.php
http://writ.news.findlaw.com/commentary/20051102_broussard.html
http://www.freep.com/voices/editorials/eparks3e_20051103.htm