Читать книгу Blessed Peacemakers - Robin Jarrell - Страница 39

4 February 1913—24 October 2005

Tired of Giving In

On 28 August 1955, a black teenager named Emmett Till was brutally murdered in Mississippi because he flirted with a white woman. He was tortured, shot, and dumped in the Tallahatchie River. His mutilated body was recovered three days later.

Two months later, Rosa Parks, a black seamstress in Montgomery, Alabama, who had been a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) since 1943, attended a meeting in which Till’s murder was discussed. Three days later, anger at Till’s murder and years of accumulated weariness at being mistreated because of the color of her skin prompted Parks to do something that would spark the first large-scale campaign of active nonviolence in the United States. As Martin Luther King Jr. later said, “no one can understand the action of Mrs. Parks unless he realizes that eventually the cup of endurance runs over, and the human personality cries out, ‘I can take it no longer!’”

Coming home from work on 1 December, Parks refused to give up her bus seat for a white passenger, as local custom required. The enraged bus driver had her arrested. Within hours Montgomery’s black population, which accounted for 75 percent of the regular riders on the city’s buses, had heard about the incident. Two days later, Martin Luther King Jr., at the time an unknown young Baptist preacher, urged blacks to quit using public buses until the segregation policy was dropped. The boycott lasted for over a year, with forty thousand blacks getting to work—in some cases traveling as far as twenty miles from where they lived—any way they could without availing themselves of public transportation. City buses stood empty, the bus line lost thousands of dollars, and the eyes of the nation became focused on the problem of racism in the Deep South. In the end, the city agreed to the boycott organizers’ demands. The boycotters had demonstrated to the nation that nonviolence works.

The general assumption after Parks’ arrest was that she had refused to give up her seat because she was worn out from working all day. But she was quick to point out that she wasn’t physically tired at all. Instead, she said, “the only tired I was, was tired of giving in. I did not want to be mistreated, I did not want to be deprived of a seat that I had paid for. It was just time. I had not planned to get arrested. I had plenty to do without having to end up in jail. But when I had to face that decision, I didn’t hesitate to do so because I felt that we had endured that too long. The more we gave in, the more we complied with that kind of treatment, the more oppressive it became.”

Parks’ act of resistance cost her personally. She was fired from her job, and eventually she and her husband, now unemployable in Montgomery, had to leave the city in search of work. But her refusal to give up her bus seat had colossal consequences. Although she couldn’t have known it at the time, it was the spark that ignited the civil rights movement.