Fifty years ago last Thursday, a little Colored woman boarded a yellow and green bus on Dexter Avenue in Montgomery, Ala.
Whenever I think about the story of Rosa Parks and how her refusal to give up her seat to a white man sparked the Montgomery bus boycott, I get chills.
First, I am astounded at how quickly and effectively word of the Bus Boycott traveled in an era without technologically advanced communications systems. Just five days after the seamstress and NAACP program director was arrested, Montgomery’s buses were nearly empty.
I am also humbled by how a group of people, more than 40,000 residents, were so determined and so dedicated to a common goal that many marched forward in the face of great odds.
For 381 days, the people of Montgomery walked miles and miles to get to and fro. Along those dusty roads, they were taunted and threatened. People lost their jobs, not because they couldn’t get to work but because their employers didn’t agree with the protest.
Many who had cars offered them up for car pooling. Some who could afford it went out and purchased cars for the cause.
What strikes me most about the boycott, though, is the sacrifice.
Sometimes I wonder what I would be willing to sacrifice in that same way today. What cause would be so great, so awesome, that I wouldn’t mind being inconvenienced? And for how long? A day? A couple of days? Three hundred and eighty-one days?
When I think about the boycott, it makes me wonder if I’m even capable of sacrifice like that.
I forget my cell phone and I feel disconnected–as though I’ve lost the use of a limb, as though I’m crippled without it. I’m away from my e-mail or the Internet, and I feel adrift.
While I was in Mississippi covering Hurricane Katrina for the Tribune, I found myself out of sorts at times as I drove for miles down Mississippi highways. My cell phone was useless. My car was always on the verge of running out of gas.
My experience, of course, was a minor, minor inconvenience compared with that of victims who had lost everything and had no idea when their lives would be patched together. Besides, they weren’t getting paid to go through what they went through.
So while I may have been reminded of what it means to be inconvenienced for a few days, I still don’t know the type of sacrifice that says you’re willing to give up everything for your principles and your rights.
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In its most basic definition, to sacrifice means simply to give up something of value to get something in return.
We are expected to sacrifice for our family, for the good of the company, for the good of our community and country.
My 92-year-old grandmother moved to Chicago from Mississippi when she was 5 years old. I grew up with her stories about how she and other family members opened their homes to relatives and friends who came up from the South.
They shared beds and created pallets; they shared whatever was in their cupboards. They held rent parties for the down-on-his-luck neighbor and pooled their savings to pay for the unexpected. In later years they helped their precinct captains and went door to door registering people to vote.
When the Montgomery Bus Boycott began, my grandmother recalled how Chicago was still mobilized after the Emmett Till murder trial.
Her South Side church, like many others, passed the collection plate and sent money to their Montgomery brethren to help pay for gas and the general upkeep of cars.
The Chicago chapter of the NAACP held fundraisers. People drove cars from Chicago to Montgomery, for the cause.
Sacrifice is most recognizable when it appears in its greatest form. But where would we be without the relatively small sacrifices?
There are few people like the boycotters and far more like my grandmother whose sacrifices may never go down in the historical record.
But they provide the momentum for us to move forward.
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