By not moving, she energized a movement

EVERY so often during crucial moments in history someone steps forward to alter the conduct of a culture by confronting its forces of evil. And at other times, someone stands up to these forces by just sitting there. Such is the legacy of Rosa Parks.

Soft-spoken and small of stature, her battle cry was a firm but dignified “I am not going to move” to a bus driver’s demand that she, a black lady, give up her seat to a white man and move farther back in the bus.

Unlike the student who faced down a tank in China’s Tiananmen Square 16 years ago, no cameras were present to codify the moment, but its impact was far greater than that of the youth who confronted armor with idealism.

By her quiet but unyielding defiance in 1955 Montgomery, Ala., she lighted the torch that signaled the birth of the civil rights movement in America.

Martin Luther King Jr. articulated the quest for human dignity after that, Congress passed supporting laws and an unstoppable surge of revolutionaries marched through the 20th century like soldiers in an army of atonement.

I met Rosa Parks in a Detroit beauty parlor in 1980. Looking more like a retired librarian than anyone’s hero, she sat primly, hands folded in her lap, as a hairdresser fussed over her in preparation for a trip to Los Angeles. It was the 25th anniversary of her arrest in Montgomery and L.A. wanted to honor her.

I had tracked her down to an office building where she was an assistant to Democratic congressman John Conyers. Clearly, she preferred to avoid publicity as much as possible, pointing out that in the quest for civil rights, “I was only a worker.”

A secretary tipped me to her presence at the beauty parlor during her lunch hour. She reluctantly agreed to answer a few questions.

Even though she informed me in no uncertain terms that “I do very well left alone,” she allowed me to be with her at the beauty parlor, in the office where she worked and next to her on the flight to Southern California.

It was one of the more memorable moments in my career.

The beginning of the civil rights movement coincided with the start of my life in newspapering. It was a time of fire and thunder, of threats and great words, of dignity against dogs and clubs and fire hoses.

We saw the faces of white America twisted with hatred. We saw armed troops ordered into the streets of Dixie to ensure the safety of the nation’s African Americans. We heard ugly words hurled like firebombs not just across the South but in segments of the country where we hadn’t realized such hatred existed. We saw crosses burned and black churches burned and the beaten bodies of freedom marchers buried, but we also saw the tide of history sweep over the reluctance of a culture to accept a race of people as equals.

The time had come and Rosa Parks was there.

There are few heroes in my life, and she’s one of them. It isn’t so much her iconic posture, now rooted in the past tense of history, but the quiet, almost whispery nature of her stance. She was a living self-denial of her own courage, understanding it completely but unimpressed by its size.

“I am not that important,” she said to me as we flew to L.A., anticipating the fuss that would be made over her when we landed. “I was just tired of being humiliated and degraded.”

I remembered her words as I heard of her death Monday at age 92. They continue to resonate. Tributes, spoken and written, have circled the world like the first notes of a dirge played at the grave of a warrior.

As time passes, there will be statues erected in her honor, more schools and streets named after her and more books dedicated to that moment in Montgomery when an Alabama seamstress assumed legendary proportions by refusing to move.

It’s the very fuss that Rosa Parks preferred to avoid.

As I reread the story I wrote in 1980, I realized why I was more impressed with her than I have ever been with the noisy politicians and celebrities who have clamored for attention during the course of my career.

Parks did more that day than face down a bus driver and a Jim Crow law that relegated her to the back of the bus. By refusing to trade her self-respect for obedience, she stood up to a sordid narrative of American racism that denied full citizenship to millions of our citizens.

Rosa Parks enlightened our age with her presence and fired the passions of a movement with her resolve. Self-esteem was important to her, and so was dignity. She combined them both in a moment of defiance that ennobles us all.