Comments on: RIP Rosa Parks

By: Rebecca

Rebecca — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 14:02:15 +0000

Rosa Parks was truely an amazing person, refusing to give up her seat on a bus. Though I’m a white, she really fascinated me. This is a great thing topic to talk about.

By: Solomeen

Solomeen — Wed, 26 Oct 2005 16:09:37 +0000

Yes, there were people before Rosa who took a stand — er, I mean — a seat. But there was a concentrated effort to make sure the person the community backed was above reproach. There had been other instances in which black leaders looked and decided that, for whatever reason, the person wasn’t the right one to support.

Indeed, if you look at the hell Rosa and Raymond Parks caught after the boycott began, you can see she was the right person to support.

There’s a reason she had lived in Detroit all those years.

There’s so much we are losing and I’m trying to make sure the young people around me know about it.

People, encourage the young people around you to pick up a book and READ. I find it generally helps if they see YOU doing it.

By: aliajsmith

aliajsmith — Wed, 26 Oct 2005 15:09:59 +0000

First Ossie, now Rosa…I told my students yesterday that I felt like we were losing something vital, like an entire generation was disappearing.

As I was lamenting the loss, one of my students said, “Who’s Ossie Davis?”

Another asked, “Rosa Parks was still alive? I thought she died a long time ago!”

These are 10th graders (read: not that much younger than us). The generational gap isn’t big enough to make that alright. So tragic, I wanted to cry. To them, the movement is already ancient history. So much so that whenever they get on public transportation, they head straight to the back. Don’t even pass Go.

And that’s just sad.

(By the way, I much prefer the original version of Barbershop, in which Cedric yells, “Martin Luther the King…was a HO!”. They edited that out after like the second week in theaters. But it was funny as hell, irreverent or not.)

By: big grip

big grip — Wed, 26 Oct 2005 11:36:36 +0000

This is a very interesting topic. I too am somewhat surprised by the lack of response.

Ms. Parks is a hero in the movement. But I think her heroism is based on her being the “right” type of person to support.

I suspect there were dark skinned less articulate sisters who encountered this same dilemma on the Montgomery transit system. They probably refused to move, and their punishment was adminisitered by the vigilante squad that passed for law enforcement in “the Gump”.

Their plights were probably ingored because they didn’t have MLK or MLK jr on speed dial.

Ms. Parks made a tremendous contribution to the movement, but it is sometimes overstated by her handlers and some other civil rights vets.

By: Kirk

Kirk — Wed, 26 Oct 2005 02:54:07 +0000

I’m a little surprised that this topic hasn’t had more comments. Even if she did just “sit her ass down”, that was enough for a whole lot of people to stick to one goal for an awful long time. Even if you were to ignore the merits of the cause, that’s still a hell of an accomplishment.