An uncommon heroine

Rosa Parks received the Congressional Gold Medal yesterday. Along with her Presidential Medal of Freedom, the 86-year-old mother of the civil rights movement now possesses the highest civilian awards the nation can bestow.

Those honors — plus the standing ovation at this year’s State of the Union address, the personal blessing by Pope John Paul II at a mass in St. Louis last year, the dozens of streets and schools named for her, the Rosa Parks Museum and Library on the same Montgomery, Ala., corner where she was arrested — are but small tokens of the respect due this woman of uncommon character and courage.

More uncommon, in fact, than is generally known. The popular myth of Rosa Parks is that she was merely a simple black seamstress back on Dec. 1, 1955, too tired to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus to a white man, too tired to stand in the “colored” section at the back.

The full story makes her actions that day even more heroic. Rosa Parks had been an aggressive, yet peaceable, fighter for civil rights long before she took a stand by keeping her seat. She had been secretary of the Alabama chapter of the NAACP since 1943, the same year she was thrown off a Montgomery bus for the first time (coincidentally, or perhaps not, by the same driver who had her arrested 12 years later). She had led several voter-registration campaigns and had herself been turned away from the polls at least three times. No matter how tall the building, she always took the stairs so she wouldn’t have to ride the segregated elevators.

Her resolve hardened when he saw the bigotry her brother and other black soldiers were greeted with when they returned home from World War II, and she took on a special project of monitoring the violence committed against them. She advised the NAACP’s Youth Council on responding with dignity to racism. In the months just before her arrest, she tracked the cases of three black women also arrested for violating Montgomery’s “bus code” and of the three white Mississippians who beat a black teen to death and then were acquitted by an all-white jury.

Rosa Parks did not know her refusal to yield would spark the Montgomery bus boycott, those 382 days that changed the nation. She did not know that a local struggle would propel Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to fame or that it would lead the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down segregation laws.

But, in the personal sense of putting herself in real and immediate danger, she knew exactly what she was doing. She knew she’d be arrested by racist police. She knew she and her husband would lose their jobs. She knew the threats and retribution “uppity Negroes” could expect. She knew the evil she was confronting and the violence of which it was capable. She looked the ugliest face of human nature in the eye and neverblinked. She is, as the congressional citation reads, a living icon for freedom.