Notes on Rosa Parks

Some years before 1955, when Rosa Parks took her well-documented seat on the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, I was a preschooler in Yonkers, New York. I lived in a mostly white working class neighborhood and had many friends on my block. One day, for no reason that I could understand, my white friends and their older siblings attacked me. When I asked my young friends why, they said the older children had told them that I was “colored.” I didn’t know what that meant, so my father tried to explain. The attack still made no sense to me. Neither did my fourth grade teacher who, after I had answered most of her lesson’s questions, asked me, “Why are you so smart?” Maybe she thought that Negroes were incapable of learning. Then there was my friend, Agatha, who was very excited when she told me about the great time she had at her beach club in the Bronx. When I asked if I could go, she said that Negroes couldn’t join the club.
Now, that was years after Rosa Parks had refused to move from her seat. But none of that was as bad for me as when my father refused to let me go on a sixth grade trip to Washington, D.C. No matter what I did-whine, cry, argue-nothing would change his mind. He told me that, as a World War II veteran, after he had almost been killed in Germany’s Black Forest, after he and his company had helped clean up the horrors of Dachau, he had to eat in a segregated restaurant in Washington, D.C. that faced the Capitol building. He did not want me to experience this humiliation as the only African American in my class.Throughout this time I had been told that my grandmother, an African-Mohegan woman who was a nurse companion by day and a “race” woman on her own time, had worked to desegregate Rye beach in Westchester County, New York. And on my father’s side, his great-great uncle, John Mercer Langston, was the first black elected official in this country and later a congressman, ambassador to Haiti, and more. So frankly, at the time, Rosa Parks and her bus seat didn’t impress me. None of these actions by family members or strangers had seemed to make any difference. But then I began to notice the strength of character of those civil rights protestors who were hosed, chased by dogs, spat upon, insulted, and murdered. And I realized what Rosa Parks had done.
This dignified little seamstress had, by force of her own humanity, made the rest of us know that we could make a difference. In many ways, this changed the country. In many ways, though, it didn’t. The week Mrs. Parks died, I read about 50 student essays. About two-thirds of them- by white, black, Asian, Hispanic, and blended race UB students-recounted their personal experiences of mistreatment based on their color or cultural heritage. This, 50 years after Rosa Parks took her seat, is a shame. It is also her challenge to us to continue her legacy. After all, it is clear that some things have changed for the better. The same Capitol Rotunda that my father seethed at from his seat in an all-black restaurant is where Rosa Parks was honored last week. Her bus journey had led there where she was the first woman to lie in state. Perhaps if we understand that, like her, we can make a difference by performing simple acts of courage when we encounter prejudice, the progress toward true equality and respect will continue. I’m sure that would be her wish for us.