Document text
- Subscribe - Contact Us - Rate Card - Place an Ad Archives Revels Classifieds Real Estate Menu Guide Wedding Weather Subscribe Contact Us November 5, 2005 Rosa Parks’ contribution honored Scott Dalgarno I only saw her once. She was in her 70s then. Rosa Parks was shy and soft-spoken, at home in her own skin but clearly uncomfortable with celebrity, known as she was as mother of our nations’ civil rights movement. She acknowledged pride in the title but seemed more at home looking on as others spoke of all that was won in those pioneering days. She was a 42-year-old tailor’s assistant when she was arrested and fined $10 plus $4 in court costs for refusing to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery city bus. Her action triggered a 381-day boycott of the bus system led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., at the time an unknown clergyman, and a relative newcomer to Alabama. I remembered hearing it said that she was just a cleaning woman with bad feet who was simply too tired to pick herself up after a long day scrubbing, but she corrected that pallid legend, insisting that the only thing she was tired of was the humiliation. In his book, “Stride Toward Freedom,” Dr. King wrote, “Actually no one can understand the action of Mrs. Parks unless he realizes that eventually the cup of endurance runs over, and the human personality cries out, ‘I can take it no longer.’” There comes a tipping point in a person’s life when annoyance and moral exhaustion can galvanize into righteous indignation. Rosa Parks said she had hours of clerical work to do for the NAACP waiting for her at home that December afternoon, plus a workshop to prepare for teenage activists she was to train that weekend, but something bigger was tipping over within her, and it would not be righted. Malcomb Gladwell has written a insightful book on the subject called simply, “Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference.” Gladwell tells us that the term comes from the world of epidemiology. It’s the name given to that moment in an epidemic when a virus reaches critical mass. It’s the boiling point. It’s the moment on the graph when the line starts to shoot straight upwards. Gladwell argues that ideas can be contagious in exactly the same way that a virus can be. One chapter, for example, deals with the very strange epidemic of teenage suicide in the South Pacific islands of Micronesia. In another he argues that the enthusiasm of one person for a novel written by an unknown author can, in fact, be the catalyst necessary to propel the book to the bestseller lists, just as one woman’s insistence that she had a right to stay seated on a bus could lead to a whole people’s rising, as it were. Rosa Parks was neither a prophet nor a martyr; she was simply the tipping point of a gargantuan spilling over of justice. As Dr. King said, Mrs. Parks’ arrest “was the precipitating factor rather than the cause of the protest.” The bus driver told Mrs. Parks that he would have her arrested, and she told him to do what he felt he had to do. When a policeman arrived to do what he saw to be his sworn duty Rosa Parks said what I believe to be her most important words during that great crisis of truth: “Why do you people continue to insist on bullying us?” The policeman answered, “I don’t know, but it’s the law.” How perfect. You can hear in the hollow sound of that man’s uncertain response a cog in the wheel of history click, can’t you? The outright lie that black people are less than human or are somehow an uber-underclass just wasn’t working anymore and people, black and white together, were just (it was 1955) catching sight of it. The Imperial Wizard, it seemed, had no clothes, and the astonishment at that revelation became suddenly legion, beyond everyone’s expectations, even Dr. King’s. It’s not unlike the wisdom in the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes. “There is a time for everything under the sun,” it says. For Dr. King, the time to keep silence was past and the time to speak up had come. But for that to happen someone else had to realize first that it was her time to stay seated. And by remaining seated Rosa Parks stood up for all human beings everywhere, not merely those who were being oppressed. She did her oppressors such a great favor that day. By remaining true to what she knew about her own dignity as a human being she allowed them to give up the burden of continuing to tell a tired old lie; a lie they’d inherited from their grandparents; a lie they knew was heavy and awkward and which exhausted them more and more in the telling. What new tipping point might we as a nation be brimming toward now, I wonder? Scott Dalgarno is pastor of Ashland’s First Presbyterian Church. DailyTidings.com Home Page Archives | Revels | Classifieds | Real Estate Guide | Weather | Subscribe | Contact Us Copyright 2005 Ashland Daily Tidings and Ottaway Newspapers All Rights Reserved Deep Muscle Stimulator Ceramic Piggy Banks FREE Entertainment Guide Women's & Men's Slippers Accelerate Weightloss Products Backpacks Generic Viagra Vegas Travel Guide Search Engine Optimization Sportsbook Absinthe Supply Student Loans Hotel & Airline Reservations African Safari Hammocks Helzberg Diamonds Online Casinos Community Bonus Casino King of Spirits ink cartridges Mortgage Calculator Security Systems Mailing Lists Click Here Advertisement .:Advertisements:. Site Search: RESOURCES - Mail Tribune News - ODOT Road Cams