All Saints Day seems like a fitting time to pay my own humble tribute to the life and legacy of Rosa Parks. Others more qualified than myself have written fitting eulogies describing her role in history. So I will keep my own comments personal. Mine is a simple thanks to a great Saint.As far as I know no one in my family was ever made to ride on the back of a bus. Though there is some speculation that a great-great grandfather of mine may have been of Jewish ethnicity (he was an Abrams), I am pretty much Anglo-Saxon through and through. The Prices crossed the Atlantic from Wales and my mother's family, the Reicherts, made their way to America from Germany. Though I am indeed a strange breed of ethnic cross-pollination, I am white as can be. I did not therefore grow up thinking of Rosa Parks as a hero for my people.
Certainly she was an American icon - an old woman frozen in the misty recesses of ages past when America was not as noble as it was in 1985. For all I knew Rosa Parks was already dead by then. To think she could possibly live another 20 years was unthinkable to me as a child who grew up on the myth that Rosa Parks was an old, tired, hard-working, sore-footed back-aching woman, who finally had enough one day and said no to some mean old man who wanted to steal her seat. This was the history I bought as a young elementary student and it was a history I pretty much believed in until I somebody told me any different. If someone would have told me that Rosa Parks was a civil dissident and agitator I would have thought they were out of their minds.
My family didn't much like agitators when I was growing up. I can still remember how angry Linda DeLeon made us when she seemed always to be causing a fuss at school board meetings. Mrs. DeLeon was the only hispanic member of the Lubbock Independent School Board and she was committed to combatting racism in our school system. But us white kids learned from our parents that all this crazy scene-causing and foot stomping was out of line with how respectable people ought to behave. School board members should be good examples to the young kids and Mrs. DeLeon was certainly not providing a good example on diplomacy and compromise.
So naturally it was much easier for me to conceive of Rosa Parks as an old woman with sore feet than it was for me to think of her as she really was. And I suppose this is what troubles me most about history and why the Gospel reading for All Saints Day is so poignant, "Blessed are you when people insult you and persecute you and utter all kinds of false evils against you on account of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way the persecuted the prophets who were before you." The message is sobering: the holy ones will be rejected in their own time.
Clearly the American public grew to claim the story of Rosa Parks as its own story, albeit in a watered-down way. It is fitting for her casket to lie in honor in the center of the Capitol Rotunda as a symbol of our country's repentance and growth. We all have our own histories of racial prejudice and it is good for us to admit them. I salute our congressional representatives for leading the way in our collective tribute to a life that helped us to take a great step out of our bigotry and hypocrisy.
Yet it is not enough for us to pay tribute to the Saints of the past without at the same time looking toward those who bear the light of truth today. As people of faith we must pay heed to those who are troubling our religious and civil sensibilities today, for they may very well be the prophets of today. And as people of faith we must also seek out the true histories of our heroes - lest we miss the real lessons their lives might teach us.
I give thanks to God for the real Rosa Parks of history. I give thanks to her, not only because her faith moved the mountain we call America, but also because through that faith the children my wife and I hope to have will be able to drink from whichever drinking fountain they wish when they go to see their white grandparents in Texas. Rosa Parks faith charted a new course for American history. And it charted a new course for my history as well.
Thanks be to God.
