Rosa Parks Day

Today Oregon honors Rosa Parks on her birthday. All public transport is free for 24 hours in Portland in memory of the day Parks refused to surrender her seat in the “whites only” section of the bus in which she was riding on December 1, 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama. After that act of courage, the Montgomery Bus Boycott began, and segregation started very gradually to collapse. Racial integration became law in 1964 and remained so until this month. 

The current President issued an executive order banning celebrations of Martin Luther King Day, Juneteenth, Black History Month, Holocaust Remembrance Day, and a number of other holidays honoring people who were not white and male. Rosa Parks day was not banned because it never became a Federal holiday; rather, Rosa Parks is honored by nine States (including Oregon) and several cities.

Both Rita Dove and Nikki Giovanni have published poems about Rosa Parks. By the time she took her place in history, Parks had been an activist with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for twelve years. She was carefully chosen and prepared to refuse to give up her seat, knowing she would be arrested. She stepped onto the bus, knowing what she was about to do. I imagine her heart beat fast, her breath was shallow. But she played her role exactly as planned, and what she did worked. Until now.

Rita Dove writes,

How she sat there, 
the time right inside a place
so wrong it was ready.

Now we arrive at a time that is wrong, but we are trying to get ready. We’ll see how this develops. Rosa Parks poems by Dove and Giovanni are in the links to their names above. Rita Dove was recently on Finding Your Roots with another brilliant writer, Amy Tan. Link to that episode.

I’m trying to learn to see what, other than people, is interesting to photograph. Working on it.