Remembering Rosa Parks’ quiet courage

Seventy years ago today, a quiet Christian woman changed history. Rosa Parks, born in 1913 in the segregated South, was raised by her mother and grandmother. The descendant of slaves, she began working on a plantation in Alabama at the age of six. Raised in the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), Parks grew up memorizing Scripture, singing hymns, and attending church weekly. As an adult, she taught Sunday School every week.

At the turn of the 20th century, as Jim Crow laws were passed in many Southern states, Montgomery, Ala., passed an ordinance that segregated the city buses by race. The first several rows were “white only” and if they filled, black passengers in the middle and back rows were required to give up their seats for white passengers. Parks, like other black riders, had endured this humiliation for many years. In 1943, she had a confrontation with bus driver James Blake and, to make way for a white passenger, was forced to get off a city bus.

Twelve years later, on Dec. 1, 1955, Parks hopped aboard a similar bus, sitting in a middle section, when Blake confronted her and asked her to move. She refused and was arrested. Parks’ refusal sparked a nationwide bus boycott that lasted over a year. Her quiet act of resistance not only sparked this protest—in which 40,000 Montgomery residents refused to ride city buses—but it helped launch the career of civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. In June of 1956, in Browder v. Gayle, the Supreme Court ordered Montgomery to stop enforcing bus segregation, further chipping away at segregation in the states, permitted by the 1896 Supreme Court case, Plessey v. Ferguson.

Rosa Parks’ refusal to go along with the unjust system of racial segregation is an example of Christian courage. Her act, grounded in the Christian doctrine of the image of God, reminded America that it had yet to live up to the promises in the founding charter that “all men are created equal.” But it did not come without great cost. Her family was forced to move out of Alabama for fear of safety. She spent the rest of her days in Detroit, Mich.

In 1996, President Bill Clinton awarded Parks the Presidential Medal of Freedom and Congress awarded her the Congressional Gold Medal. When she died in 2005, she was the first woman to lie in state in the United States Capitol. President George W. Bush signed a bill that authorized the creation of a statue memorializing her in the Capitol. He said of Parks, “By refusing to give in, Rosa Parks showed that one candle can light the darkness.” In 2013, her statue was unveiled.

Seventy years after that fateful bus ride, we have much to learn from Rosa Parks’ life. She is an example of someone whose Christian faith was not kept contained to the walls of the church she loved but motivated her to work to change social policy on behalf of the most vulnerable. Christians are often shamed for “being political,” but as Parks demonstrated, the gospel is both personal and social. How can we claim to love our neighbors as ourselves if we shrink back from the opportunity to shape the world in which our neighbors live?

What’s more, we learn from the civil rights movement that while Scripture urges us to be good citizens and obey the laws of government (Romans 13), there are times when to be faithful to Christ means we must resist unjust laws. Parks’ willingness to do this, to be arrested, face social shame, and displace her family helped create the conditions that ended segregation. Might we, in our own time, find the moral courage to oppose the evils of our day, even at great cost. Southern Baptist leader Richard Land said of her, “Rosa Parks was a great woman who was committed to uncovering wrong and doing right.”

Rosa Parks, whose favorite Psalm was Psalm 23, drew strength from her faith in Christ. She said, “I was fortunate God provided me with the strength I needed at the precise time when conditions were ripe for change. I am thankful to him every day that he gave me the strength not to move.”

May future generations say of us that we found similar strength not to move.