Rosa Parks, the seamstress in Montgomery, Ala., who in 1955 refused to give up her bus seat to a white person, died yesterday at age 92.
Our blogstress-fave La Shawn Barber has this lovely tribute (hat tip: Michelle Malkin) to this brave woman who sought only the color-blind rights that the Constitution guarantees to all Americans:
“What became known as the Civil Rights movement was bound to start sooner or later. It was only a matter of time before blacks would reject all that ‘back of the bus’ and ‘Whites Only’ nonsense. In a country where they were paying taxes, too? Please. I’m surprised the movement didn’t hit America with full force 10-15 years earlier when black men were fighting for their country in WWII….
“December 1, 1955, was also the beginning of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which lasted about a year. Blacks refused to ride the buses in Montgomery, Alabama, until November 13, 1956, when the U.S. Supreme Court declared segregation on buses unconstitutional. Despite its embarrassing and often pathetic history, America is still, by far, the greatest country in the world, no matter what color you happen to be.
“Parks and her husband Raymond didn’t have children, as far as I can tell from news accounts of her life. In a way, I suppose those she inspired to stand up to injustice were her offspring.”
Contrast Parks’s quiet and dignified heroism to the hatred-spewing rhetoric of Kamau Kambon (thanks again, Michelle), who declared on Oct. 14 that the best way to avoid another Hurricane Katrina debacle would be to “exterminate white people off the face of the planet.”
As recently as this past spring, Kambon was actually on the payroll as an instructor at taxpayer-subsidized North Carolina State University–although that remark of his proved to be a bit much even for famously liberal academia. While university officials did not exactly promise that Kambon would be barred from further preaching his idiosyncratic notions about social planning on the NCS campus, the chancellor’s office did issue a statement declaring that Kambon’s “type of speech is counter to any reasoned discussion on the issue of race relations, and is absolutely unacceptable in the NC State community.”
Our next Ward Churchill (who, according to our friends at Pirate Ballerina, is still keeping a busy speaking schedule at our nation’s taxpyer-funded colleges).
And on an unrelated but constutional topic, congrats to the people of Iraq!