Thank You Sister Rosa Parks (1913 - 2005)

When Rosa Parks stood up by sitting down on that segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama back in 1955 she sparked the flame that would burn away the weeds of Jim Crow Laws -- the legal codes that kept black citizens cordoned away from the whites in what were ostensibly considered "seperate but equal" living conditions...Sister Parks was fed up with that shite and wasn't going to take it anymore. So when that white bus operator told her to get up so that some white dude could sit down or he'd call the po'po', Rosa said,"Call the police! I ain't moving!" and the rest, as they say is herstory...from the tiny acorn grows the mighty oak, yo...The seamstress' act of defiance, the resulting arrest by a group of jack-booted thugs shone a light on the hypocrisy of the codified racism that was on the American legal books. It galvanized people to jump into action and protest with boycotts and sit-ins, like an obscure young Baptist minister named Martin Luther King..."When that white driver stepped back toward us, when he waved his hand and ordered us up and out of our seats, I felt a determination cover my body like a quilt on a winter night." Parks said in her autobiography "My Story" Rosa's stand against the North American version of Aparthied and the ripples of change it caused forced this country to hew closer to the ideals grandiloquently espoused in it's Constitution but never applied to it's sepia-toned citizenry...what Ms. Parks' actions taugh me as a child is if you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything and for that I'll always give thanks for Sister Rosa's stance...