"You may do that."

Ms. Rosa Parks

Saw a wonderful, if strangely done, documentary on Rosa Parks the other night. It was full of detail and was incredibly moving--I cried hearing Dr. King speak. So many things I did not know! I learned basic, basic things about the impetus of the civil rights movement that EVERY American should know.

*btw: "You may do that," is how Rosa Parks replied to the driver after he told her he was going to arrest her for not getting out of her seat (in the "colored section," mind you) for a white man to sit down.*

Some things: December 1955

*Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a young preacher (27 years old) in Montgomery, AL with "a pretty wife and a new baby." And that's all people really knew about him before the bus boycott. Once he spoke at the church, with hundreds of people busting out of the doors, he just *was* their leader. His voice resonating like some holy spirit (what I would imagine Moses might have sounded like) he had every single soul in that church on his side: the side of tolerant, non-violent revolution. ("the cup of endurance has runneth over")And he was nothing short of a revolutionary. (A lage-scale revolution was feared why the gov--that's why they were so scared of him. That's why the FBI had to bug him I guess. That's why his house was bombed. That's whberated barrated with death threats. I guess that's why he "had to die." Good lord it makes me depressed.)

*After his house *was* bombed, he addressed the mob that was growing outside his house, angry and readly to retaliate. In his calm, otherworldly way he said warned them, "Violence must not come on any of us...we will have walked in vain..." and hoped (dreamed) for "a society with a conscience...a society at peace with itself." The crowd was struck silent--someone started singing "Amazing Grace."

*They interviewed this sweet white preacher (who had an all black congregation) who was 26 years old in 1955. He advised his entire congregation not to take the bus.

*How many days did the righteous people of Montgomery boycott the bus system? A week? A month? A few months? TRY 381 BLOODY DAYS. Amazing. Even more amazing was how the people, both black and white, organized carpools, bake sales raised money for the churches to buy "churches on wheels" to get people to work and school.

*Dec. 21st 1956: The Supreme Court struck down segregation. Only the beginning...