One ordinary woman, one extraordinary legacy

Rosa Parks’ name should be familiar to anyone who has taken a history class, but it probably is not. Time erodes memory of even the brightest heroes. More so when their heroism recalls the darkest aspects of our past.

That is too bad, because if slavery and segregation betray our willingness to forsake our most basic values — as surely they do — then Parks, who died Monday at age 92, showed the stuff that makes people and nations great.

Armed only with courage, dignity and determination — and seeking no personal reward — sh e insisted on being treated fairly despite laws that mandated she be treated unfairly. And she altered history.

For younger Americans, it might be dif = cult to imagine life 50 years ago in Montgomery, Ala., and wide swaths of the country. Jim Crow laws required racial separation on buses and trains. Restaurants, hotels and stores were allowed to serve whites only. Schools and colleges were segregated, and those for blacks were often worse than second-class. In the land of the free, liberty and justice were for whites only.

Then on Dec. 1, 1955, Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus so awhite man could have it, and everything began to change. She was jailed and = ned, and the Montgomery black community’s pent-up resentment erupted. What started as a four-day bus boycott went on for more than a year. The boycott’s leader, Martin Luther King Jr., was vaulted into national prominence, and led the civil rights movement to triumph a decade later.

Other blacks had been arrested, beaten and even killed for doing what Parks did — refusing to kowtow to white bosses, police, bus drivers or thugs. No one missed the message. But Parks, a seamstress with no special clout, was willing to pay the steep personal cost. She lost her job. Harassment and death threats forced her to move away.

But as Parks and others sacri = ced for principle, the nation noticed. Segregation ended on Montgomery’s buses, and in time the whole ugly system of U.S. apartheid fell.

“ I’m a person who always wanted to be free and wanted it not only for myself; freedom is for all human beings,” Parks told the Detroit Free Press

in 1995.

The history of the past half-century is a story of freedom’s expansion for millions, thanks in no small part to one ordinary

woman — and her

extraordinary

action.

By Kevin Glackmeyer, AP In Montgomery: The Rosa Parks Library and Museum features a bust of the civil rights pioneer.