THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, January 31, 1995 TAG: 9501310277
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: MARC TIBBS
LENGTH: Medium: 72 lines
Wednesday begins Black History Month, and detractors no doubt will again question the need for such a commemoration.
Some feel that black history ought not be singled out from any other part of American history, but a glance through any history textbook reveals the lack of history about African Americans and their contributions to this country.
Take Rosa Parks, for example.
Not many history books tell you the whole story about the ``mother of the civil rights movement.'' Most texts would have you believe that Parks was just a seamstress too tired to obey a bus-segregation law in Montgomery, Ala., that cold day in December 1955.
Her refusal to relinquish her seat to a white passenger led to a 381-day boycott of the bus system and raised the consciousness of an entire nation, thrusting onto the national scene a reticent, 26-year-old preacher - Martin Luther King Jr.
Parks' actions that day were much more than the spontaneous response of a weary worker.
A year before her arrest on Dec. 2, 1955, the Supreme Court had ruled ``separate but equal'' schools unconstitutional in the historic Brown vs. Board of Education.
Blacks in Montgomery and across the country were restless for justice, and many saw the court's ruling as the death knell for Jim Crow.
In Montgomery, for example, blacks had been looking for a test case to challenge segregated bus laws, and Rosa Parks had been active in that struggle.
In March of 1955, Claudette Colvin, a high school student, had been thrown from a Montgomery bus for refusing to give her seat to a white passenger. Black leaders considered Colvin's case as a court challenge, but found it too risky. The 15-year-old girl had resisted arrest, and she also was unmarried and pregnant.
As youth adviser for the NAACP, Parks knew Colvin. She had raised money for the girl's defense. Ten years earlier, Parks had herself been physically thrown off a bus.
So after work on that December day, there was Rosa Parks, sitting in the ``colored section'' of an already crowded bus. When the white section filled, the driver asked Parks and three other black riders to ``let me have those seats.''
Only one white passenger needed a seat, but Montgomery law didn't allow blacks and whites to even sit parallel to one another. The driver wanted all four blacks to stand.
Parks remained seated.
She knew that segregation law stated that black riders could only be compelled to give up a seat if another seat were available. There were none.
``I was thinking that the only way to let them know I felt I was being mistreated was to do just what I did - resist the order,'' she later recalled. ``I had not thought about it (that day), and I had taken no previous resolution until it happened, and then I simply decided that I would not get up.
``I had felt for a long time that if I was ever told to get up so a white person could sit, that I would refuse to do so.''
Rosa Parks cooperated with Montgomery police, but her resolve led to her and King becoming living American legends.
It's almost sacrilege to remember Rosa Parks each February as just a tired seamstress. She was much more than that. She ripped asunder Jim Crow's fabric, and if she is indeed the ``mother of the movement'' then hers was surely a planned parenthood. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
Rosa Parks
by CNB