On the book shelf: Rosa Park's courage took root in the truth

Do you recognize the woman in the picture to the right? It's Rosa Parks, and she's one of my heroes.

As children, our heroes are larger than life: they have fantastic powers of some sort, even if it's just athletic ability that beggars belief. As we age, we come to favor a more compelling type of hero: the everyman, or in this case, everywoman, who overcomes tremendous odds to achieve something remarkable for the common good.

Soldiers, law enforcement officers, firefighters -- these professionals are often thrown in harm's way and must demonstrate courage at great cost to themselves. If they're fortunate enough to survive -- sometimes they don't -- when asked how they summoned the raw guts to perform so valiantly, their responses are along the line of "I didn't think about it; I just did my job." Consider those who entered the inferno of the World Trade Center on 9/11.

We expect this of military and public safety professionals. After all, when you're trapped in a burning building, a firefighter afraid to render assistance isn't much help. Even though most of us couldn't, or wouldn't, do so, because our instinct for self-preservation is stronger than our desire to help others. It's understandable, and that's why we recognize such valor when it comes to our attention.

But courage takes many forms, and occasionally people for whom valor isn't part of the contract dig deep within to find what it takes to be a hero. Rosa Parks was such a person. She was a black seamstress who refused to surrender her seat on a city bus to a white man in Montgomery, Ala., in 1955. Her act of heroism: She spoke truth to power.

Power, in this instance, was the Jim Crow laws that had plagued the American South since shortly after the Civil War. Racial segregation was codified into a long list of laws that effectively ignored the 14th Amendment by adopting the concept of "separate but equal" treatment. Separate is not equal, by definition.

Rosa Parks was arrested for her defiance -- that photo's her police mug shot. Her act of everyday heroism sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott and encouraged the Civil Rights Movement, which culminated in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

When asked how she found the courage to stop knuckling under to 80 years of "go along to get along," she said, "You must never be fearful about what you are doing when it is right."

The library is celebrating Black History Month, but that's not why I focused this column on Rosa Parks. Rosa Parks isn't a black hero, or a woman's hero, she's an American hero: Her courage changed things for every citizen of these United States, and her example of standing up for what's right should inspire us all to do the same. We won't make headlines by rushing into burning buildings, but in our small ways, we can do the right thing.


Lani Clarke is the supervising librarian at the Vacaville Public Library-Cultural Center.

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