What Rosa Parks Meant to a Gen-X White Yankee Girl

Rosa Parks was a hero to the civil rights movement. But she was also a hero to a white, middle class, Gen-Xer from Pittsburgh…me.

Rosa Parks was one of my heroes because she epitomized what it meant to be courageous and dignified. She knew her God-given worth and she refused to accept the narrow-minded racism that would have her believe she was less than she knew she was. Mrs. Parks was a lady in the true sense of that word.

In his book, "Stride toward Freedom," Martin Luther King said of Parks that hers was "an individual expression of a timeless longing for human dignity and freedom." All of us can relate to that groaning for freedom. Few of us can understand what it is to have that freedom repeatedly, often violently denied. Mrs. Parks understood.

From all that I know of her, Mrs. Parks was also a Christian. She was a lifelong member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. If her trust was indeed in Jesus, Mrs. Parks is now experiencing a kind of freedom of which any of us could only dream—the freedom that is only found in the presence of one's creator.

So thank you Mrs. Parks. Thanks for your courage and your dignity. Thanks for inspiring me to stand up for what I know to be right even in the face of hardship. Enjoy your rest and your reward. I'll look forward to sitting down with you for a chat on the other side.

Linked at La Shawn Barber's Corner, Wizbang, Volokh, and Indepundit.