ROSA PARKS | 2005-11-10
Rosa Parks recently died.
She was the black woman who refused to go to the back of the bus in the summer of, I think, 1955 which began the bus boycott that rocketed Martin Luther King to fame, a Nobel Prize, and sainthood in our established religion of Political Correctness.
The reason she was chosen to do this was because of another Southern prejudice. If a man had done that the bus driver or the police would have tossed him off the bus. But Southerners would not physically assault a woman.
As I say, I have seen women beaten by the police when marching against busing. But in the South, Rosa knew she could count on our prejudice against that sort of thing.
We are shamefully backward.
As civil rights leaders kept saying, "If you're dealing with Southerners, don't count on their morality, count on their courtesty."
A very practical left-handed compliment you will not see quoted today.
In fact the integrationist group, The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), had as its symbol a CONFEDERATE flag with a black and a white hand shaking each other under it.
This leads to something else that is not mentioned about Rosa Parks. When the Confederate flag controversy got under way about 1990, she supported the Confederate flag at first. I assume she backed down after she was informed that it offended her.
As the SNCC symbol ahows, the Confederate flag wasw not looked on as a symbol of hate OR tradition.
IT was not seen as a POLITICAL symbol, but as a GEOGRAPHICAL symbol.
So SNCC's Confederate flag specified that it was fighting for integration in the South. I doubt seriously whether anybody thought they were advocating a return to slavery.
When forty thousand robed Klansmen marched in their robes down the street of Washington, DC in 1927 almost every one of them had a flag in his hands. None of them were Confederate flags. They were each the flag of the United States of America.
To Rosa Parks, who was born, raised and died in Alabama, the Confederate flag was the symbol you used to show you were from the South or IN the South. She remembered the 1927 Klan march, but it never occurred to her that the American flag was a Klan symbol.
They had to tell her that she was offended by the Confederate flag.
Francis Scott Key, who wrote "The Star Spangled Banner" definitely saw the American flag as a White ONLY flag. He wanted blacks sent "back" to Africa. He wanted the Indians shoved out of the way.
Rosa Parks did not think of that when she stood for "The Star Spangled Banner." It never occurred to her.