JACKSON - In six weeks it would have been 50 years to the day since the little seamstress in Montgomery, Ala., used the power of her quiet dignity to protect her seat in the front of a Montgomery city bus from both Jim Crow and a long forgotten white man on Dec. 1, 1955.
By refusing to vacate her seat on a city bus to allow a white man to be seated in her place, Parks - then 42 years old and a barber's wife - set in motion the process that would forever integrate public transportation in America as the Supreme Court ruled in her case in 1956 that segregated public transportation was unconstitutional.
Parks died in Detroit Monday at the age of 92.
Perhaps more than any other icon of the civil rights movement, the story of Rosa Parks drove home the idiotic notions of the Jim Crow laws and of an antebellum culture that allowed mere custom to do even more harm if archaic Jim Crow laws missed an opportunity.
Her courageous decision forced Americans to confront the hard questions of whether they would want their daughters, sisters, mothers, grandmothers or wives treated as Mrs. Parks was being treated on a daily basis.
Mrs. Parks' refusal to give up her seat for a white man also shot gaping holes in the vaunted notion of Southern chivalry - the glorification and protection of women as a cultural ideal - and laid bare the fact that many white Southerners of that era considered black citizens to be subhuman and treated them accordingly.
Mrs. Parks gently but firmly demanded to be treated as a human and as a lady. She demanded it for herself and for her people.
A half-century after she defied law and custom that day in Alabama, the South still labors under racial concerns, but it is a different environment. Public accommodations are open to all.
I am of the last generation of white Southerners who remembers segregated schools, hotels, restaurants, physicians' waiting rooms and separate rest rooms, water fountains and movie theater seating. Days before my 10th birthday, the majority of Mississippi public schools integrated as a direct result of the Holmes v. Alexander school desegregation decision.
But it is in the memories of the waiting rooms of a few physicians - in which very sick black children would languish in the arms of worried black mothers until every white patient had been seen by the doctor - that the mean-spirited, irrational parts of the Jim Crow era roll back.
The first substantial blow against such treatment of African Americans was delivered by Parks. It is difficult to overstate her place in the pantheon of this nation's civil rights movement.
Most simply called Mrs. Parks "the mother of the civil rights movement."
For the crime of refusing to vacate her bus seat and give it to a white man that day in Montgomery, Parks was fined $14. But in so doing, she became the symbol of meaningful civil disobedience as a method of gaining ground in the civil rights movement.
The stance of Rosa Parks paved the way for the civil rights gains inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Later in her life, while serving as an administrative assistant to Democratic U.S. Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, Parks would be instrumental in bringing about the passage of the Martin Luther King national holiday.
At her death, this nation is reminded at once how far we've come toward building a more equitable society - and at the same time how very far we have to go before the dream of freedom and equality she inspired is realized.
