Rosa Parks and the Burden of History

Wednesday • October 26, 2005

In his massive work, A History of the American People, British historian Paul Johnson observed that American history raises some of the most fundamental questions of meaning and morality. The first question Johnson identified was whether a nation can “rise above the injustices of its origins and, by its moral purpose and performance, atone for them?”

The death of Rosa Parks raises that question anew. Mrs. Parks died Monday at age 92, an icon of the Civil Rights movement and a national symbol of courage and determination. Her iconic stature insured that the news of her death spread around the world. Yet, too many Americans remain unaware of what was at stake when she refused to move to theto suggest that time was running out on segregation and that its demise was inevitable. Nothing in human history is inevitable. Individuals like Rosa Parks were instrumental in breaking the back of segregation and revealing its unvarnished evil.

We should note that Rosa Parks had been working up the courage to defy the bus edict for well over a decade. In Rosa Parks, Douglas Brinkley’s biography of Mrs. Parks in the “Penguin Lives” series, Brinkley sets the record straight, documenting her earlier confrontation with segregation on Montgomery’s buses in 1943. He also describes in detail the confusing ugliness of the prevailing policy:

Out of all the Jim Crow laws, those segregating buses were the most complex and arbitrary. With water fountains the apartheid code was simple: One was marked ‘colored,’