Rosa Parks: Reluctant Hero
Published as "Heroes come in many sizes" in the Friday, October 28, 2005
edition of the Greensboro News & Record
The “mother” of the Civil Rights Movement passed on Monday leaving behind a legacy of courage, dignity, and inspiration. Many are aware of the defiant action Rosa Parks took on December 1, 1955 when she refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama public bus to a white man who demanded it. That simple act of passive resistance has grown into an iconographic thread, interwoven in the fabric of American history. She is, without question, an American hero in every sense. Yet few would have imagined that a hero could take the form of an unassuming forty-three year-old department store seamstress.
As a professor in the African American Studies Program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, I constantly ask my students to tell me who they view as their heroes. Beyond the mention of a few superstar athletes, I get little response. There is an obvious void that my classes are designed to address. I teach about people like Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, Ida B. Wells, Matthew Henson, Paul Robeson, Thurgood Marshall, Mamie Bradley (the mother of Emmett Till), and, yes, Rosa Parks. I ask my students to consider the personal qualities that may have resided in these individuals propelling them to greatness in the face of racial oppression and adversity. I challenge my students to tell me how their capacity to be the heroes of the next generation is any different from the previously mentioned historical figures. Somewhere within all of us there must be a line that cannot be crossed, a conviction that is worth fighting for, and a movement that must be started and sustained to fruition.
I also tell my students that I have personal heroes and one of them is Rosa Parks. While her actions on the bus are legendary, what makes her so special to me is the simplest of words that she uttered--she said “No.” It must be remembered that an African American saying “No” to a white person in the Deep South, historically, faced dire consequences. Slaves who said “No” to their owners often found themselves severely beaten or sold far from their families. Former slaves, the Freedmen, and their descendants who said “No” to the cruelties of oppressive Jim Crow laws were often lynched or saw their homes go up in flames and their livelihoods destroyed. When Rosa Parks made her stand that fateful day in Montgomery, she was well aware that dire consequences could befall her and her family, yet she still chose to say “No.” The story of her defiance on the bus suggests that she was too tired to vacate her seat. She was, like thousands of others who would later join the Civil Rights Movement, more tired of being treated as a second-class citizen. Those who followed Rosa Parks as fighters for freedom and justice echoed the word “No” as they spread out across the nation and, ultimately, changed the world.
I am sure Rosa Parks never anticipated that she would be viewed as an American hero and a living symbol of the African American struggle for equal opportunity. But we know that heroes come in all sizes, shapes, colors, and genders. We know that heroes maintain their dignity and humanity throughout ordeals that potentially threaten their very existence. We know that heroes have the power to launch major campaigns to end oppression. We know that heroes would willingly accept all the consequences for not complying with a white bus drivers order to “get up and move to the back of the bus” because it was a righteous cause. We know that heroes look just like Rosa Parks.
Frank Woods is director of the African American Studies Program at the University of North Carolina. He is the author of “Lose Not Courage, Lose Not Faith, Go Forward: Selected Topics of the African American Experience 1900-2000.” 
