All I was trying to do was get home from work.*
It's not like Rosa Parks was the first African American to get arrested for sitting in the wrong part of the bus. Plenty of African Americans got arrested, in part because African Americans always knew the difference between justice and injustice and partly because Montgomery had one crazy law. The color barrier on Montgomery buses was fluid: Whites in front, blacks in back, one empty row in between. Where the front ended and the back started varied depending upon how many people were on the bus and what they happened to look like.
The Montgomery chapter of the NAACP wanted to challenge that law. But they needed the right person. They wanted someone who would be respectable, middle class -- someone with unimpeachable character. They did not want someone who worked for their own organization -- like Ms. Rosa Parks -- because they wanted the challenge to seem unscripted and unordained.
But, one day, in 1955, the elastic color barrier on the bus moved. And Rosa Parks did not. She was just trying to get home from work. And she just didn't want to move.
It's fifty-three years later, and Mr. Obama is just about set to take his seat at the front of the bus. It's not a perfect bus, and the rest of us, those riding along with him, are not perfect either. But the bus is moving forward. Let's hope it stays on course. Alleluia. Amen.
*Quoted in Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters.
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