State-sanctioned Sainthood has been bestowed upon a woman who did not much of anything. While it's always heroic to defy the state, especially concerning the humiliation brought upon black individuals, we never hear the real truth: that Rosa Parks was...

Why can't black people have heros like Ben Carson, Mae Jemison, Robert Lawrence, etc...?

I'm sorry dw but you're over analysing things. It really is as simple as I've laid it out. Rosa Parks was used to further the agenda (I'm not saying the agenda was wrong) in a staged event.

You also need to do more reading up on Rosa's involvement with the NAACP dw. More specifically, research her husbands involvement and their assistance with certian events prior to the bogus bus bash.

How can the Republicans be part of a white counter-movement when 80% of Republicans in the House voted for the Civil Rights Act? For all of the objections to that Act in function and constitutionality, it's a little hard to believe that the Southern Strategy was a racist movement 3 years after that kind of turn-out.

I don't like big government, but I really can't justify federalism as a covert racist movement. How can welfare reform be racially motivated? When most blacks aren't poor and most poor aren't black, that's pretty weak sauce. I hope our government is more resourceful than that, even if they're doing something as horrible as you suggest.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy

Outside the Beltway: she "set off a revolution by refusing to give up her seat on the bus."

A later OTB post is headlined, provocatively, "Rosa Parks an NAACP Pawn?" but OTB goes on to note: "The strategy behind Dr. King's movement, modeled af...

For one thing, it wasn't like there were only two blacks in the history of the South who were arrested for not yielding their seat to whites. This had been happening for years in Montgomery and in other cities with similar laws. Parks herself had been arrested in 1943 for doing what she did on 12/1/1955. Supposedly, some blacks may have been killed for doing this, though I can't find any obvious evidence of it. But it wasn't just two people -- an upright seamstress and a pregnant teenager -- who refused to move.

Secondly, there's the question of Parks' NAACP involvement. The legends suggest that she was some wheel in the NAACP, but in reality she'd only joined that year, and she was merely a volunteer doing go-fer work and helping run some workshops for adolescents. There is no evidence the NAACP put her on that bus or told her that she had to resist.

Thirdly, the "opposite" myth -- that she was tired and her feet hurt -- is also completely false. In later interviews she said she didn't move because she wasn't giving up her seat. In effect, she was calling bulls**t on bus segregation. But it sounds so much nicer that this middle-aged woman didn't move because her feet hurt, so that's what (incorrectly) made it into the textbooks.

One other interesting fact is now cautious and conservative the Montgomery NAACP played their cards. What were their demands? That blacks be treated with respect, that black bus drivers be hired, and that the MIDDLE of the bus be desegregated. Not the WHOLE bus, the MIDDLE of the bus. They only got full-scale bus desegregation because of an unrelated suit (which the main NAACP was part of). And as part of their conservatism, they threw the new black preacher to the front as their spokesman, the son of a noted black preacher in Atlanta, because if the boycott failed they could just throw him and his family on the next train back to Daddy and no one would have to risk their own hides. And that preacher... well, you know who he is.

So, anyway, it's not as simplistic as Evans makes it out to be. With the Emmett Till having grabbed headlines that summer, the media was primed for race relations. The NAACP had been looking for a test case for a number of years. Rosa Parks refused to move. And the movement -- and the white counter-movement that eventually gave birth to the Southern Strategy and the modern Southern-led GOP -- was off.

She's not Gandhi, but her one small action was enough to finally start a popular movement that had been begging for an ignition point for several decades. Her moment on 12/1/1955 changed the direction of American history, and we're living with the consequences of what happened that evening.

I imagine the world would be much worse than it is in its current state.

Laurence: We've improved in a lot of ways but, to be sure, there are areas where we were better off 50 years ago.

Has humanity really progressed?

You’ve undoubtedly heard by now that Rosa Parks passed away lastnight at the ripe old age of 92. I saw a little about it lastnight on FoxNews before heading to bed. Many people attribute the civil rights progress that was made since the 50&#82...