The First

Today is December 1, 2012. I woke up this morning thinking that I needed to write a post about the Christmas season and anticipation and waiting and advent, and then I got on Facebook, as I often do first thing on a Saturday morning, and I saw another first and changed my whole blog writing plan. This will not be a post about Christmas, but it is about waiting and the end of it. This date in 1955 a courageous woman did something that sparked an entire movement that in the end brought about tremendous change to a group of people who had been waiting for it for hundreds of years. The woman was Rosa Parks. At the age of 42, younger than I am now, she decided enough was enough. She was riding a bus in Alabama and she refused to give up her seat in "the colored section" to a white person who was having to stand because the "white section" of the bus was filled. She was arrested for Civil Disobedience, and the Alabama Bus Boycott followed. She has now become the iconic symbol of the beginning of the Civil Rights movement. It's funny. When I've heard her name mentioned in relation to this incident, I always pictured this very old woman who resembled Cecily Tyson in the role of Jane Pittman, and I incorrectly thought she was sitting in the White section, the dangers of learning history in this generation of sound bytes and snippets on the Internet. Her age doesn't really matter. What she did took courage! After all, she was following the rules. She was sitting in "her" section. Why should she be asked to stand and give up her seat just because her skin was a different color? In today's world, this seems ludicrous, but this was an every day occurrence for all African Americans. Their lives were filled with signs posted in restaurants, and public restrooms and even water fountains that said, WHITES ONLY. 

Many years ago I took my two girls to see a local production of Ragtime, a musical about different people whose lives intersect  and the way they change each other for good and bad. There is a scene where a group of white firemen are abusive and taunting to a black man they encounter out for a drive in his new car. They end up vandalizing the car and nothing is done about it. When intermission came, both my girls, who were elementary school age at the time, asked me why the firemen were being so mean to the man. I had to explain to them the way things used to be between races. I was so proud of the fact that, in their little world, they had never encountered discrimination or seen someone treated less than human because they were a different color. I was proud of their school and their community that this concept was foreign to them. Now, I'm not saying we live in a perfect world and discrimination was wiped out on December 1, 1955. I am not that naive. I know it is still very prevalent in certain minds in this country, but we are light years ahead of the way we were in 1955, and Rosa Parks helped start that journey of acceptance and harmony. Because of her courage that day and the countless numbers of people that followed her lead, change came, slowly, but it came, and the waiting ended.