[Editor's note:  Back before
Molly Regan became a regular poster with Blog for Iowa, she wrote this
tribute to her hero, Rosa Parks, for us.  Rosa Parks died yesterday at the age of 92.  In her honor, we are rerunning Molly's original article.]




On December 1, 1955,
in Montgomery, Alabama, Seamstress Rosa Parks got on a bus and sat
down.  When she was told by a white man to move to the back of the
bus, she refused, and was subsequently arrested.  “Our
mistreatment was just not right, and I was tired of it,” wrote Parks in
her book, Quiet Strength,
(Zondervan Publishing House, 1994). “I kept thinking about my mother
and my grandparents, and how strong they were. I knew there was a
possibility of being mistreated, but an opportunity was being given to
me to do what I had asked of others.”  



This defiant act of courage
set off a flurry of incidents which resulted in violence and death over
the next 10 years, and eventually led to the passage of the CIVIL
RIGHTS ACT in 1965.  For you see, Rosa Parks was a black woman who
was not allowed in the Alabama of 1955 to ride on public transportation
with the same human dignity that most of us today take for
granted.