Why can we never remember the names of famous actors? It’s resorted to this. We had a date night this weekend and went to a movie. Later when we tried to explain which one, we couldn’t think of the name. All we could come up with was: “It’s the one with Legolas and Spiderman’s girlfriend.”
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The “mother of the civil rights movement,” Rosa Parks, has died. Her courageous decision almost half a century ago sparked a movement that was soon led by a Montgomery pastor named Martin Luther King, Jr. Here’s the account in Taylor Branch’s Parting the Waters:
On December 1, 1955 . . . Rosa Parks left the Montgomery Fair department store late in the afternoon for her regular bus ride home. All thirty-six seats of the bus she boarded were soon filled, with twenty-two Negroes seated from the rear and fourteen whites from the front. Driver J. P. Blake, seeing a white man standing in the front of the bus, called out for the four passengers on the row just behind the whites to stand up and move to the back. Nothing happened. Blake finally had to get out of the driver’s seat to speak more firmly to the four Negroes. “You better make it light on yourselves and let me have those seats,” he said. At this, three of the Negroes moved to stand in the back of the bus, but Parks responded that she was not in the white section and didn’t think she ought to move. She was in no-man’s-land. Blake said that the white section was where he said it was, and he was telling Parks that she was in it. As he saw the law, the whole idea of no-man’s-land was to give the driver some discretion to keep the races out of each other’s way. He was doing just that. When Parks refused again, he advised her that the same city law that allowed him to regulate no-man’s-land also gave him emergency police power to enforce the segregation codes. He would arrest Parks himself if he had to. Parks replied that he should do what he had to do; she was not moving. She spoke so softly that Blake would not have been able to hear her above the drone of normal bus noise. But the bus was silent. Blake notified Parks that she was officially under arrest. She should not move until he returned with the regular Montgomery police.
At the station, officers booked, fingerprinted, and incarcerated Rosa Parks. It was not possible for her to think lightly of being arrested. Having crossed the line that in polite society divided Negroes from niggers, she had reason to expect not only stinging disgrace among her own people but the least civilized attentions of the whites. When she was allowed to call home, her mother’s first response was to groan and ask, “Did they beat you?”
Shortly after that King spoke to a packed house, anxious to hear what he’d say. He said, “Let us say that we are not here advocating violence. We have overcome that. The only weapon that we have in our hands this evening is the weapon of protest. If we were incarcerated behind the iron curtains of a communistic nation–we couldn’t do this. If we were trapped in the dungeon of a totalitarian regime–we couldn’t do this. But the great glory of American democracy is the right to protest for right. . . . We are determined here in Montgomery to work and fight until justice runs down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream!”