DETROIT (ABP) — Reacting to news of Rosa Parks' death Oct. 25, Christian leaders said Jesus was the model for the woman who kept her bus seat in order to stand against injustice.
“She saw her participation in the struggle for justice as integral to her being a disciple of Jesus,” said Peter Gathje, a professor at Christian Brothers University in Memphis, Tenn. “Because she recognized a law higher than human law, she knew that breaking an unjust human law was perfectly consistent with her Christian faith. Just as Jesus broke laws in the name of the higher law of God, so too did Rosa Parks.”
Parks died at her home in Detroit the evening of Oct. 24, according to the local medical examiner's office. She was 92, and had been involved in educational efforts in the Detroit area for decades.
But the lifelong member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church will forever be remembered by generations of Americans as the Montgomery, Ala., woman whose defiant act sparked the greatest social upheaval in post-World War II American life: the civil rights movement.
Parks “was a giant in the land,” said Gary Percesepe, executive director of the Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America, in comments sent to Associated Baptist Press. “When Rosa Parks sat down, an entire nation began to act up.”
On the evening of Dec. 1, 1955, Parks was a 42-year-old seamstress and housekeeper in Montgomery, heading home from her job at a downtown department store. In defiance of a local segregationist law, she refused a city bus driver's order to get up from her seat to make room for white people who had just gotten on the bus.
Parks was arrested for disorderly conduct. On the advice of a white attorney who was a friend and in consultation with local civil-rights leaders, she agreed to challenge in court the law segregating the city's buses. Her attorneys argued that it contradicted the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision, which outlawed segregation in public schools. The argument eventually prevailed, and segregation in Montgomery's public accommodations was also declared unconstitutional.
“God sat with me as I remained calm and determined not to be treated with less dignity than any other citizen of Montgomery,” Parks said, remembering her famous display of courage in a 2000 interview with the Montgomery Advertiser.
The action led to the Montgomery bus boycott, which lasted more than a year and involved more than 40,000 black residents. Rather than ride the buses, notorious for such treatment of blacks, the protesters walked or made use of an elaborate system of black-owned taxicab companies, carpools and station wagons purchased by black congregations and dubbed “rolling churches.”
The event was the first major protest of the civil rights movement, and catapulted the 26-year-old pastor of Montgomery's Dexter Avenue Baptist Church to its forefront. As a result, Martin Luther King Jr.'s philosophy of nonviolence steered the movement from its start.
Contrary to popular perceptions of her defiance as the action of a fed-up and tired woman, Parks' act was both spontaneous and planned.
A longtime volunteer secretary of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Parks had been involved in the early years of civil-rights advocacy for African-Americans.
She was born Rosa Louise McCauley Feb. 13, 1913, in Tuskeegee, Ala., the daughter of a carpenter and a teacher. In 1932, she married Raymond Parks, a barber who was also active in the NAACP. He helped lead a committee of black Montgomery men who raised funds for a group of African-Americans arrested in Scottsboro, Ala., and wrongly accused of raping a white teenager. The “Scottsboro Boys,” as they were called, were cleared by the Supreme Court in two 1930s decisions.
The arrests of two other Montgomery black women had presaged Parks' bus protest. However, NCAAP officials had considered neither of those incidents the proper “test case” for their plans — plans of which Parks was aware — to challenge the city's segregationist bus laws.
But the quiet seamstress and housekeeper — considered by those in Montgomery's African-American community to be humble, dignified and morally unimpeachable — proved the perfect candidate, according to historians' accounts of the boycotts. Within a few days' time, she had become the symbolic mother of a movement that would breach the levees of the South's oppressive racial structures in a long-pent-up flood of justice.
How did such a meek woman end up breaking the back of a decades-old system of oppression?
“Rosa Parks' disobedience to an unjust law was grounded, I believe, in her instinctive understanding of a higher moral order based on the sovereignty of God and the dignity of each person made in his image,” said Timothy George, dean of Beeson Divinity School at Samford University in Birmingham, Ala. “Rosa Parks was not a theologian, but she knew the words of Amos and Jesus as well as if she had been their contemporary.”
Parks' civil disobedience was part of a wider tradition among American Christians — especially those of minority denominational traditions or ethnic backgrounds, according to one historian.
“Rosa Parks' passing should cause Baptists to remember that the practice of civil disobedience among Baptists did not begin in the 20th century with the civil rights movement,” said Walter Shurden of Mercer University in Macon, Ga. “Early Baptists of New England, in the 17th and 18th centuries, refused to abide by laws that constrained their consciences. Early Baptists in America deliberately, intentionally and premeditatively broke laws that they saw as unjust.
“Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. had Baptist predecessors in civil disobedience. Their names? Roger Williams, John Clarke, Obadiah Holmes, and Isaac Backus, among others,” Shurden continued. “The death of Ms. Parks could goad Baptists to remember what we ought not to forget.”
“Rosa Parks' courage to confront a cultural norm could shove us all away from the dumbness and numbness of ‘going along to get along,'” added Tom Prevost, national director of the rural poverty initiative for the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. “She was done with segregation. We should be done with mindless consumerism, heartless elitism, and endless demonizing of those who don't agree with us. When will we ever learn to ‘be kind to one another?'”