Original title: This is one of the most moving and real moments of human beings,
and it's worth remembering again and again. This week, the American media has
been writing about a great woman, Rosa Parks. Even Trump changed his usual style
and sent a serious video speech on Twitter, praising her courage. Who's Rosa
Parks? She used to be an ordinary black seamstress in Montgomery, Alabama. On
December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, 42, went to Cleveland Avenue to take the bus home
after work as usual. Because there were many passengers on the bus, the driver
asked her to leave her seat after one stop and give it to the white man who got
on the bus later. What happened after that is now forever frozen in one of the
most moving, memorable and cinematic moments in human history: Rosa Parks
refused the driver's unreasonable request and said No softly. Rosa Parks's
action ignited the fuse of equal rights for black Americans. December 1, 1955
was regarded as the beginning of the civil rights movement, and Rosa Parks was
called the mother of the civil rights movement. Her name is almost a household
name in the United States, ranking high in the list of the most influential
American women, and her story has been written into textbooks and history books,
made into movies and television, and told year after year. Rosa Parks, of
course, was a worthy hero, but when she said No, she didn't have any ambition to
be a hero. She simply endured injustice for too long, tired of it, and didn't
want to endure it any more. Most of the heroes in real life are actually like
Rosa Parks, ordinary people like you and me, but at a certain moment, the blood
rushes to their brains and they don't care about anything. Expand the full text
➊ Let me restore the situation at that time. As we all know, the United States
was still segregated at that time, and the situation in the North was better,
but in most southern States, the discrimination against minorities was very
serious, especially in Alabama. And these discriminatory policies are backed up
by laws called Jim Crow laws. The Jim Crow laws were not one law, but a series
of segregation laws in every state in the United States. Each state has
different laws, but the general principle is the same, that is, public
facilities must be mandatory to separate white and colored people-please note
that in many cases, it is not only black people who are separated, but all
colored people, including Mongolians, Malays and so on. Not only transportation,
but also schools,
garment
measuring tape, prisons, toilets, theatres, barbershops, parks, stadiums,
all have to be isolated, even mental hospitals. If a restaurant wanted to serve
black customers, it had to be divided into two sections by a screen; it was
illegal for a black person to walk into a restaurant without a screen. Alabama,
North Carolina, Mississippi, Georgia, Louisiana.. Every southern state has a
fascist law like this. What is even more absurd is that these laws, which are
full of discrimination, are under the banner of equality. Their logic is that
although they are segregated,
large
print tape measure, blacks have black areas and whites have white areas, and
different races receive the same facilities and treatment. Therefore, they do
not violate the principle of equal protection of the law for all people in the
Constitution of the United States. Imagine if you were a black man living in the
American South in 1950, and you were subjected to such discrimination every
moment you stepped out of your house. You may feel bad, but you may also feel
lucky. A few decades further back in history, in the early 20th century, there
was still widespread lynching in the south of the United States, where blacks
who committed crimes, sometimes even suspected of committing crimes, were hanged
or burned alive in public by angry white crowds. At that time, there were more
than 4,000 recorded cases of lynching, and there may be more that were not
recorded, and none of the perpetrators were punished. Jim Crow laws claimed to
protect equality, while lynching claimed to uphold justice for heaven. There are
still a lot of photos on the Internet, and you can see that the onlookers seem
to be attending a garden party, looking calm and even smiling. At that time,
these photos were made into postcards for people to collect, mail and share-one
of the darkest periods in American history, bearing in mind that even the Nazis
did not make souvenirs of concentration camps. Such systematic discrimination,
such large-scale and widespread atrocities, took place just 60 years ago, 100
years ago. Looking back now, it really makes people sigh infinitely. I don't
know whether to lament the rapid progress of human society in the past 100 years
or the cruelty and barbarism of human nature. ➋ Now, you can probably imagine
how many heavy memories of humiliation and terror Rosa Parks carried on her
shoulders when she boarded the bus on that winter evening in 1955. In addition
to such collective memories, I think Rosa Parks must also have many more painful
and real personal memories, which came from the humiliation and threats she
suffered personally. At that time, the front rows of the bus were reserved for
white people,
seamstress
measuring tape ,
retractable
tape measure sewing, and the back rows were reserved for black people. Black
passengers had to put in a coin at the front door, get off, and get on through
the back door. Sometimes narrow white drivers will quickly close the door and
drive away after the black passengers get off with coins, so as not to let the
black people get on. Rosa Parks was once teased in this way. It was a rainy
night 12 years ago. After she got off the bus after putting in coins, the bus
went away and splashed her with sewage. After that, she vowed that she would
never take the driver's car again. Every time she got on the bus, she would
confirm that if it was the driver, she would rather wait for the next bus. But
on December 1, 1955, before she got on the bus, she neglected to pay attention
to the driver's appearance as usual. Instead of sitting in the white section,
she sat in the back row of the white section, which, according to convention,
allowed blacks to sit only when the white section was not full, and once the
white area was full, the row had to be given to other whites. One stop later,
white passengers got on the train. The driver came over and asked the passengers
in the row to get up and give up their seats. Rosa Parks saw that the driver was
the man who had played a trick on her 12 years ago. The other three Negroes rose
obediently, and Rosa Parks might have done the same as usual. But on that day,
at that moment, the memories of 12 years ago came to her mind, and the memories
of personal and group humiliation were mixed together, which made her suddenly
not want to endure the fate of being discriminated against day after day. The
driver asked her, "Will you stand up and give up your seat?" "No," she said
calmly but firmly. The driver said, "Then I'll have to let the police catch
you." Rosa Parks said, "Whatever." In her biography, Rosa Parks explains her
thinking this way: "a lot of people say I don't want to give up my seat because
I'm too tired, but that's not the case.". I'm not tired at all, or at least not
as tired as I usually am at the end of the day. And I wasn't old. I was only 42.
I'm just tired, tired of giving in. The exact words were: People always say that
I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true.. The only
tired I was, was tired of giving in. Later, when I first saw the photos of Rosa
Parks fingerprinting and holding the prisoner's number plate at the police
station, I immediately understood what she meant-you could see that her eyes
were firm, her expression was calm, and she was not afraid or frightened. That
little bit of determination to sacrifice her life for justice and face death
unflinchingly is probably because she is tired of endless submission. ➌ The
arrest of Rosa Parks aroused the anger in the hearts of those who had already
had enough of bullying. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People (NAACP) bailed her out, and under the leadership of Martin Luther King,
led a bus strike in Montgomery, and people of conscience across the country
organized in support of them. An inadvertent act by Rosa Parks accidentally
ignited the fuse of the whole civil rights movement. I have to lament the unity
of the black people at that time. For more than a year, they insisted on not
taking buses and choosing to walk or ride bicycles wherever they went. The NAACP
also used church and private cars as an alternative to buses to pick up black
passengers at a fixed time and place every day. They also set up a special
traffic dispatch center to delimit route stations and make carpooling plans. The
black population in Montgomery occupies the overwhelming majority, and the
income and social status are very low, originally is the main passenger of the
bus. Their boycott has cost bus companies dearly, leaving many routes almost
empty. More seriously, because black people are mainly engaged in service work,
many white people need these nannies and servants to help wash clothes, do
housework and take care of children, so after the black boycott of buses, white
people's lives have also been affected. A year later, a federal district court
ruled that segregating passengers on buses was unconstitutional. Alabama
appealed, but the Supreme Court upheld the ruling. On December 20, 1956, the
Supreme Court's judgment document was served, and the 381-day bus strike
movement ended successfully. That day, Rosa Parks boarded the same bus again,
sitting in the seat she refused to give up a year ago, and a journalist took
this precious picture. Everything since then is a vast and mighty history. In
1963, Kennedy presided over the drafting of the Civil Rights Act, which banned
discrimination in public places and authorized the U.S. Attorney General to sue
state governments for racial discrimination in the educational system. In 1964,
the Civil Rights Act was finally passed by Congress, and LBJ, who succeeded
Kennedy as President after his assassination, signed the bill, and the Civil
Rights Movement won a decisive victory. Of course, in the intervening decades,
there have been countless struggles, countless bloodshed and the cost of life
(Martin Luther King was assassinated, Rosa Parks was fired by the company under
pretext, had to move to another city to make a living, and received many death
threats). There are also countless thrilling moments, including the famous
incident of blocking the school gate in 1963. In order to prevent two black
students from reporting to the University of Alabama, the governor of Alabama
ran to the school gate and confronted the Federal Marshal and the Deputy
Attorney General. That evening, Kennedy made a tit-for-tat national television
speech, demanding that every citizen be guaranteed equal rights. Forrest Gump
also has this image. There are so many wonderful stories that I will not list
them here. ➍ When Rosa Parks died in 2005, Condoleezza Rice, also from Alabama
and the first black woman to serve as secretary of state, said, "Without her, I
would not be here today as secretary of state." On December 1, 2015, the 60th
anniversary of Rosa Parks' refusal to give up her seat, then-President Barack
Obama boarded the 2857 bus that has been collected in the museum and sat in the
seat she refused to give up. Without Rosa Parks, Obama would not be today's
Obama. If you are interested in this kind of history, you can also watch the
Hollywood movie "Selma" in 2014, which is about Martin Luther King's March in
Selma, another small city in Alabama. Oprah Winfrey makes a cameo appearance in
the film-without Rosa Parks, Oprah would not have a chance to be the Oprah she
is today. All of this came from Rosa Parks's gentle No on the evening of
December 1,
tailor
measure tape, 1955, from her sudden thought, "I'm just tired of giving in.".
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