The power of one

IT was a split-second decision. Not decided by committee. There was no ad-hoc study and no visible force behind her. She was alone.

In the time it takes an average person to decide if she wants flies with that, or the sauce on the side, Rosa Parks' singular decision--50 years ago--changed the world. Parks decided not to get up and give her seat to a White man. A University of Minnesota study several years ago discovered that people make anywhere from 300 to 1,700 decisions daily. Most of those decisions don't change the world. Her decision did. Historian Lerone Bennett Jr. remembers that the tiny, bespectacled Parks demonstrated quiet strength in her solitary act against an entire system of oppression. "She was one woman on a bus, surrounded by hostile forces, who changed everything for us," he said.

And she changed everything for a 26-year-old newly minted pastor, Martin Luther King Jr., catapulting him to the forefront of the Civil Rights Movement he would lead for the next 13 years.

The destinies of Parks and King intersected on segregation's axis with a force that led to the end of de facto and de jure segregation in the South. It was Dec. 1, 1955, 90 years after Congress passed the 13th Amendment that abolished slavery in America, yet Blacks still were not free. Rosa Parks' refusal to give up her seat was "The Beginning of the Black Revolution," as Bennett said in his book Wade in the Water: Great Moments in Black History. And it is imperative, that as Parks and other civil rights legends slip away to their much-deserved rest that we who remain not succumb to the revisionist stupor that would downplay their contributions. Parks was not just too fatigued when she sat down on that Montgomery, Ala., bus and spoke truth to power with one quiet question, "Why do you push us around?" Parks in later years dismissed the revisionist image of King as simply a "dreamer." She told a reporter, "He was more than a dreamer; he was an activist who believed in acting, as well as speaking out, against oppression."

The split-second decision of Rosa Parks and the determined actions of Martin Luther King ignited freedom movements around the world--from Montgomery, Ala., to Soweto, South Africa, from Tiananmen Square in China to Poland and to the anti-war and women's movements in the United States.

King's march toward freedom, which began 50 years ago in Montgomery, was sown from the seeds of Parks' discontent--we should not despise the small beginnings, the small decisions of one person that sometimes can be the most dramatic and life-changing decisions of all.

So we should look to King's life and to Parks' life and remember the power of one life committed to freedom. Use what you have, where you are--now! Don't think that there are restrictions of age, gender or education on your ability to serve. Parks was more than 40 years old and working as a seamstress when she decided that enough was enough. Others said it was the content of her character that propelled the Montgomery movement. On the first night of the Montgomery bus boycott, the 26-year-old King told the Montgomery, Ala., crowd in an impromptu speech: "If you will protest courageously and yet with dignity and Christian love, when the history books are written in future generations, the historians will have to pause and say, 'There lived a great people--a Black people--who injected new meaning and dignity into the veins of civilization.' This is our challenge and our overwhelming responsibility."

Fifty years later, this is still our challenge and our overwhelming responsibility as we honor and remember Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr., and the power of one committed life to change the world.

COPYRIGHT 2006 Johnson Publishing Co.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning