Sermon

INTRODUCTION: One cool, chilly evening on Dec. 1^st, 1955, the working people of Montgomery, Alabama, were heading home from work, many of them by bus. Seventy percent of those who rode the buses were Black. This was the Deep South in 1955, which meant that Jim Crow Law reigned supreme. And what was “Jim Crow Law?”

Interestingly enough, the term comes from a minstrel show song, “Jump Jim Crow,” written in 1828 and performed for the first time in Vermont. On stage, White persons painted their faces Black, and enacted a demeaning caricature of a shabbily dressed rural black man, named "Jim Crow." Within ten years, the term’s use grew exponentially and was used to refer to racial segregation not only in Vermont, but eventually throughout the nation. Many of the discriminatory laws that evolved were all lumped together under this term. It included laws that black and white people use separate water fountains and restrooms, attend separate public schools, eat at separate restaurants, and use separate libraries, buses and rail cars.

A Civil War had been fought, and more than one-half million Americans killed each other over the issue of how America treated its Black citizens. Nonetheless, in Montgomery, almost 100 years later, Jim Crow dictated that the first four rows of a city bus were for Whites and the last 10 for Blacks. The seats in the middle could be used by Blacks, but only if no Whites sought them. And if a White person wanted a seat in the middle section in which Blacks were seated, then the whole row on both sides of the aisle had to be emptied.

Also, before Blacks could get on the bus, in which they had to sit in the back, White bus drivers made them get on in the front of the bus to purchase their fare, then get off the bus and re-enter through the back door. Sometimes when that happened, Blacks were left standing, when the bus driver’s inexplicably pulled away before they could re-board.

James Blake, the driver of the bus Ms Parks boarded in 1955, had put her off his bus in 1943, when she refused to enter through the back door because the back part of the bus was jammed full. After that, she refused to board any bus he drove. But on this particular day in 1955, one bus had already passed by full. So when the Cleveland Avenue bus stopped, Ms Parks wasn’t paying attention to who the driver was. And when she got on, even though she saw it was James Blake, she took a seat in the middle section, next to a black man sitting next to the window. In the row across the aisle were two other black women.

By the time the bus reached the Empire Theater, the White section was almost filled. When several more white people got on, they filled up all the seats reserved for them, and one white man was left standing.

"Let me have those seats," driver Blake said, indicating the seats of the middle section. No one moved. He repeated himself: "Y'all better make it light on yourselves and let me have those seats." The black rider by the window rose, and Ms Parks moved to let him pass by. The two women across the aisle also stood up.

In a television interview many years later, Ms Parks revealed, when the driver “saw me still sitting, he asked if I was going to stand up, and I said, 'No, I'm not.' He said, 'Well, if you don't stand up, I'm going to have to call the police and have you arrested.'”

And then Ms Parks made a decision that was pivotal not only for Black Americans, but every White American and our nation as a whole. Instead of getting up and moving to the back, Ms Parks slid over to the seat by the window.

She wrote in her autobiography, My Story, in 1992, "People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't so. True, I was no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old either, only forty-two. No, the tired I really was, was tired of giving in."

The bus driver said he would have her arrested if she didn’t move, and she replied, "You may do that." He called the police and they all waited. Some riders got off, but not everyone, and Parks recalled that it was very quiet on the bus. When the police arrived, she asked one of them, "Why do you all push us around?" She said he replied, "I don't know, but the law is the law, and you're under arrest." So who was Rosa Parks, this woman of courage whom we honor today?

Rosa McCauley was born Feb. 4, 1913, in Tuskegee, Alabama, the home of Booker T. Washington's renowned Tuskegee Institute. Her father was a carpenter and her mother a teacher. When her parents separated, she moved with her mother to Pine Level, Alabama, where they lived with her maternal grandparents. Her mother taught her at home until she was 11, then she enrolled in the Industrial School for Girls in Montgomery, where her aunt lived.

Segregation was sometimes violently enforced at the time. She recalled watching her grandfather guard the front door with a shotgun as the Ku Klux Klan paraded down their street.

In 1932, at age 19, she married Raymond Parks, a barber, in a ceremony at her mother's home. After marriage, and at her husband's urging, she earned her high school diploma in 1933, at a time when fewer than seven percent of Blacks had graduated from high school. About the same time, on her third try, she was finally allowed to register to vote.

She was a volunteer secretary to the president of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP, while also working as a seamstress at the Montgomery Fair Department Store, and as the housekeeper to a white couple, Virginia and Clifford Durr. The Durrs became not only her employers, but also her friends. That included sponsoring her attendance at a training workshop on racial desegregation at the famous Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, in the summer of 1955 – six months before her fateful decision of Dec. 1^st.

And on that Thursday, at 6 P.M., the police handcuffed her, and took her to jail. She was fingerprinted, but eventually bailed out that night. By now, the Black community was in an uproar over her jailing. Subsequently, Mr. E. D. Nixon, the head of the Montgomery branch of the Pullman Porters Union, and the president of the local NAACP, asked her if she were willing to be a test case for a lawsuit. She discussed it with her husband and mother and then agreed.

At her hearing, she was found guilty of violating the segregation law and fined. Her attorneys filed a petition with the U.S. District Court that directly challenged the law.

Ms Parks lost her job at the department store. Her husband quit his job after his boss ordered that no mention be made of "Rosa" or the case. Meanwhile, the leaders of the Women's Political Council mimeographed 35,000 handbills calling for a boycott of the bus system. Remember: Blacks made up 75% of bus riders. All 18 black-owned cab companies agreed to stop at all bus stops and only charge 10 cents per ride, while others carpooled or walked.

Black ministers elected a young 26-year-old, newly minted Ph.D., and pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Martin Luther King, Jr., as head of the Montgomery Improvement Association. And as they say, the rest is history.

Ms Parks continued to work for Civil Rights. But concerned about the continued fire-bombings at the homes of civil rights workers, she and her husband moved to Detroit in 1957. In 1965, she went to work for Congressman John Conyers, retiring in 1988.

During this time, with the help of Elaine Eason Steele, Ms Parks founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Improvement, a youth assistance organization in Detroit. Its basic program was to take young people on an educational tour of civil rights sites of importance – all the way from the Underground Railroad, to Montgomery, to Selma and forward.

Her life however, remained difficult. Her husband died in 1977. She was hospitalized in 1994 after a burglar broke into her house, beat and robbed her. After her recovery, she moved to a high-rise building in downtown Detroit.

She died in October 2005. A museum-and-library facility on the Montgomery corner where she boarded the Cleveland Avenue bus is named for her. She was given the Medal of Honor, the highest award that the U.S. government bestows, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian award. More than 40 colleges and universities gave her honorary doctorates, and her name is cited in virtually every U.S. history book that addresses the civil rights movement. So what lesson for life can we learn from this courageous woman?

Imagine if you will a crowded bus in a Southern city in December 1955. It’s filled with White and Black working people headed home. Maybe there are 40 or 50 people riding. There’s no government official on board. There’s no celebrity. There’s no rich person. There are no media – no radio, newspaper or television. Just people who have to ride the bus to get home from work. There is also among them a 42-year old seamstress, who is just trying to get home on the bus.

However, injustice was also riding this bus, and it raised its ugly head. Ms Parks knew injustice. She knew injustice when it refused her a cup of coffee at the lunch counter of the restaurant near where she worked. She knew injustice when, without a trial, it lynched young Black men with a rope tied to a tree. She knew when injustice drowned neighbors and friends and no one was ever charged with the murders. She knew when injustice kept Blacks miserably poor. She knew when injustice tried to make every Black daughter and son feel inferior simply because of the color of their skin. She knew when injustice made them sleep in a car at night while traveling, because no motel would rent a Black a room. She knew when injustice called her husband “boy,” and no White person ever called her “Mrs.” Parks. She knew when injustice put up White and Colored Signs, and called her the N-word.

So when the bus driver spoke, Ms Parks had already heard everything injustice had to say. And she was tired of it. So tired that she refused to move. And that one act of courage…that one refusal to move a few feet from the middle of the bus to the back of the bus…that one act of courage birthed the modern Civil Rights Movement. Ms Rosa Parks has rightly been called, the mother of that movement.

Now, it’s doubtful if any act any of us takes will ever have the impact she had. But that does not mean that what we do does not make a difference. Because every action we take has consequences. As Rabbi Harold Kushner, in his book, Who Needs God? writes:

“In the physical world, every time I wave my arm, I set the air in motion and the reverberations never stop. In the realm of the spirit, every time I dry a tear, hold someone’s hand, cause a face to light up with understanding, I have set something in motion which will never stop. It will have consequences that I will have caused, but will never know about. And the words I have written and spoken, the hearts I have touched, the hands I have reached out to…will live on.”

You can deposit that in the bank. Every thing we do lives on…large or small. It’s not the size of the act that matters, but the willingness to act.

The driver, Mr. James Blake, is asking you to move. Several others have moved and now injustice is seeking to make you move. The bus has a different name and a different driver, but it’s still the bus of injustice. It’s the hatred of immigrants and undocumented workers being spawned by demagogic politicians running for president. It’s the bigotry of public officials who want to refuse the right to marry of people in love who happen to be of same-sex orientation. It’s the injustice of a rich nation refusing health care to the working poor because that would be “socialized medicine,” while we subsidize virtually every other industry in America. It’s the injustice of politicians who insist on keeping the sons and daughters of other mother and fathers in Iraq, but would never think of sending their own.

So let me be clear: You’re on the bus. The drive is insisting you give up your seat. Ms Parks says, don’t move. Be gracious to the oppressed…the working poor…to wait staff, grocery clerks, and Hispanic landscapers. Be courteous to solicitors on the phone. It could well be a single parent mother who is working a second job to make ends meet. Speak up for justice and fairness. Reject the bigotry of those who attack undocumented workers. Speak out against war and for peace. Support gay marriage. Remember: the life of Ms Parks says little acts of courage can make a giant difference.

Several historians have made note that during the 1980s, Ms Parks was ignored on the anniversary events of the civil rights movement, and even left off the head table many times. When those omissions became public, it caused her to be a late addition to several events, one of which was the Detroit greeting committee when Nelson Mandela came to the U.S. in 1990.

There was a reception line for guests to meet Mr. Mandela. And several important people filed by. But as Mr. Mandela was greeting different ones, he looked down the line and saw Ms Parks. He stopped his handshaking and greeting dignitaries. Incredibly, he started chanting: “Rosa Parks. Rosa Parks. Rosa Parks.”

This giant among the 20^th Century’s most distinguished civil rights leaders in the world recognized the truly exceptional life and impact of this incredible woman whom we honor today: Rosa Parks. Rosa Parks. Rosa Parks.

To which we join in saying: Shalom. Salaam Aleikum. Amen. Blessed be. So say we all.

[1] Given August 19, 2007, as the twelfth Sunday of “Unitarian Summer 2007,” at All Faiths Unitarian Congregation, Ft. Myers, Florida, meeting at the Crestwell School, 1901 Park Meadows, Ft. Myers, FL, by the Rev. Dr. Wayne Robinson, minister.