Originally posted by SMIDSY
courage? how much jail time was she facin? sorry for not jumping on the "hero" bandwagon but i like to question history. she planned this ahead of time just as those people who sat in diners did. i dont think she should be singled out as a hero of the civil rights movement any more than the nameless people who stood shoulder to shoulder with Dr. King durring marches.
PS
sorry to be a buzzkill. i just dont buy into this whole "individual" thing when it concerns something that is changing the country.
Never ceases to amaze me how... 'naive' our young folks are. Rosa was at far more of a risk from a severe if not fatal beating from enraged white citizens than she was of 'jail time'. If a 'red neck billy' passenger had taken action on that bus immediately, beaten her and tossed her from the bus not one single person in that town would have made any particular note of the occurance and even if Rosa pressed charges for assault the case would not have made it before a judge before Rosa turned up dead in a shallow grave. As soon as the attention of the press became focused on the case she and her family were in extreme danger of their lives for many years afterwards.
Yah.. she had courage. Plenty of it.
SMIDSY, not knowing this is not your 'fault'. Thanks to the PC education system the context of the life of a black person in Jim Crow America is not touched upon at all in school. Fact is, if you were black and didn't pay proper respect to the white folks, you just wound up disappeared or found swinging from a tree. That was a fact of life in the south all the way up thru WWII.. and it's not something that's understood or even aknowledged today... but it's true.
Fartwinkle, the iorny of her last ride won't go unnoticed by the people that understood the gravity of her accomplishment.
