Rosa Parks

She’s best remembered as the woman who refused to relinquish her seat on a bus. Rosa Parks (1913-2005) was a curious choice to galvanize a bus boycott. She was quiet and unassuming. Martin Luther King, Jr., the 26-year-old Montgomery, Alabama pastor who led the bus boycott said of her, “She was a charming person with a radiant personality, soft-spoken and calm in all situations.” Hardly the type you’d expect Congress to honor years later as “the first lady of civil rights.” She boarded a bus in December 1955, paid her ten-cent fare, and sat in the first row of the “colored section.” When several white passengers boarded after her and stood in the aisle, the driver stopped the bus, moved the “colored section” sign back one row, and ordered the four Blacks sitting there to vacate their seats. Three reluctantly obliged, but Rosa didn’t move. “Why won’t you stand up?” The driver asked. “I don’t think I should have to stand up,” Rosa replied calmly. She wasn’t physically tired. In her words, “I was tired of being pushed around, tired of the Jim Crow laws, tired of being oppressed. I was just plain tired.” When the driver threatened to call the police, she said quietly, “You may do that.” She was arrested, released on bail, and later fined fourteen dollars for violating segregation laws. She paid a heavy price for her defiance. She was fired from her job, as was her husband, received death threats, and ultimately moved to Detroit to find employment. Much has been made of her courage, for good reason, but not as much has been written about her deep, abiding faith. She wrote of that confrontation on the bus, “I felt the Lord would give me the strength to endure what I had to face. God did away with all my fear…It was time for someone to stand up—or, in my case, sit down.” She wrote her autobiography, My Story, in 1992, but three years later wrote a sequel about the role faith played in her life, appropriately titled Quiet Strength. She recalled civil rights meetings in the early days when leaders would gather in churches to sing and pray. One of her favorite hymns, sung often in meetings, was the spiritual “Woke Up This Morning with My Mind Stayed on Jesus” from Isaiah 26.3, “You will keep the one in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on you because he trusts in you.” How appropriate to pray today: