American Civil Rights Movement
Reverend the Hon. Dr GORDON MOYES: Today, Thursday 1 December, is the fiftieth anniversary of the event that began the civil rights movement in the United States of America. That event was, of course, the famous action taken by Mrs Rosa Parks when she refused to vacate her bus seat for a white passenger who had requested that she move to the back of the bus. On this day 50 years ago, 1 December 1955, the 42-year-old seamstress was travelling home on one of Alabama’s racially segregated buses. After work that evening she was tired. She simply refused to budge. She sat down. The bus driver stopped driving, and Mrs Parks was arrested and fined for disobeying a city ordinance.
At that point the incident may have remained an unexceptional event in small-town America, soon to be forgotten. Instead, it brought about the formation of the Montgomery Improvement Association, led by the young Baptist pastor, Dr Martin Luther King Junior, that called for the now famous boycott of the city’s bus company. That boycott lasted 382 days and brought Mrs Parks, Dr King and their cause to the attention of the entire world. Resolution finally came when a Supreme Court decision struck down the Montgomery ordinance under which Mrs Parks had been fined, and outlawed racial segregation on public transportation as unconstitutional. The unlikely activists and their supporters had won.
Fifty years later Rosa Parks is honoured worldwide as the Mother of the Civil Rights Movement. As honourable members would be aware, she passed away only four weeks ago, but she was the first woman in American history to have her casket placed on display in the rotunda of the United States Capitol, an honour usually reserved for American Presidents. Her life became the inspiration behind the careers of many exceptional black women, including Condoleezza Rice and Oprah Winfrey. These women now stand tall because Rosa Parks sat down. The civil rights movement in some respects is a confusing term, as the movement, despite having civil aims, was deeply embedded in the religious. Indeed, the unstoppable forces for change came primarily from the pulpit. Dr King taught congregations the revolutionary virtue of transforming one’s enemies, not beating them. In a sermon that became quite famous, entitled “The American Dream”, Dr King issued this remarkable challenge to his oppressors. He said:
Do to us what you will and we will still love you. We cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws, because non co-operation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is co-operation with good, and so throw us in jail. We will go in those jails and transform them from dungeons of shame to havens of freedom and human dignity. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our communities after midnight hours and drag us out on some wayside road and beat us and leave us half-dead, and as difficult as it is, we will still love you. Somehow go around the country and use your propaganda agents to make it appear that we are not fit culturally, morally, or otherwise for integration, and we will still love you. Threaten our children and bomb our homes, and as difficult as it is, we will still love you.But be assured that we will ride you down by our capacity to suffer. One day we will win our freedom, but we will not only win freedom for ourselves, we will so appeal to your heart and your conscience that we will win you in the process. And our victory will be a double victory.
It was with this attitude that Dr King was able to “keep the struggle on high Christian standards”, as he put it. The experiences of Dr King made him “more persuaded than ever before that “neither death nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come … shall separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. I still believe that standing up for the truth of God is the greatest thing in the world. This is the end of life. The end of life is not to be happy, to be successful or to have money. The end of life is not to achieve pleasure and even to avoid pain. The end of life is to do the will of God, come what may.”
The civil rights movement in America proved beyond doubt that Christianity is the greatest force for change in this world. Without guns or bombs or violence, a cultural and legal tradition of black persecution was turned on its head, just as slavery was by William Wilberforce a 150 years earlier. Today those who wish to silence the vibrant voice of Christianity in politics need only remember the virtuous achievements of this movement that began 50 years ago today. We salute the civil rights movement. We remember Dr Martin Luther King Junior but, in particular, we remember Rosa Parks who enabled black women everywhere to stand tall because she sat down. 30 November 2005.
