Serendipity of a Movement

    Rosa Parks did not know December 1st, 1955 would go down in history. She boarded the bus after a long day at work as a seamstress. She was tired and cold. Have you ever been tired, hungry, and cold? On this night, it would lead to a national movement. At the corner of Lee and Montgomery in downtown Montgomery Alabama, the bus was becoming crowded. Some whites were standing while Rosa Parks sat in her seat close to the front. Someone complained. The bus driver got out of his seat and asked Parks to get up, as directed by the "separate but equal" policy dating back to 1900. Rosa Parks told the driver she was tired and had no intention of standing while a white man sat in her seat. The driver drove one more block and looked in his mirror to see the trouble maker, Parks still seated. He went back to Parks and told her she must move or the police would be called. She politely told the driver, "do what you must, but I am not moving." Parks surely knew two other women had been arrested for not giving up their seat in the previous year. She had had enough. She was willing to stay seated to make a statement, even if she ended up in jail. In fact, the driver got off the bus, went to a pay phone and called the police. Parks was arrested and booked into the county jail. Her crime was not deferring to the ordinance of mandating whites had the right to stay seated.
     A young lady named JoAnn Robinson learned of Park's arrest. Robinson worked at a local university. She took it upon herself to write a flyer asking ALL blacks to boycott the bus system. She did this at risk of her job. These messages would reach thousands of blacks. What was meant to be a three day boycott of the bus system would last for well over a year.
     The following Monday, leaders in the NAACP organization would meet and elect a young pastor to be the chairman of the Montgomery Improvement Association. That young pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church was Martin Luther King, Jr.   I will write much more about King later, but he was thrust into greatest. He never set out to be the voice and face of the civil rights movement.
     The previous history is relevant to A Rainbow in the Dark because it is the back story that allowed Henry Kirkland Jr to walk through every door that was opened by those civil rights heros that came before.