On December 1, 1955, a black seamstress named Rosa Parks got on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama and refused to move when the bus driver told her to give up her seat to a white man.
Her act of quiet defiance prompted African Americans throughout Montgomery to boycott the city buses for more than a year. Eventually it led to a Supreme Court decision banning segregation on public transportation.
Sixty-four years later, the Black Lives Matter movement and conversations about white privilege throughout many communities are bringing to the fore the pervasive wound of racial inequality that the United States has still not fully confronted.
But sometimes a symbolic act of reparation shows that things can change. For the second year in a row, the city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin remembered Rosa Parks by reserving one empty seat on each of its buses in her honor. On each seat lay a red rose and a placard with Parks’s and the story of her resistance.
Trebbe is the author of The World Is a Waiting Lover and 101 Ways to Make Guerrilla Beauty. Her new book, Radical Joy for Hard Times: Finding Meaning and Making Beauty, will be published in Fall 2018 by North Atlantic Books. Her articles about people’s emotional and spiritual relationship with nature have appeared in Orion, Sierra, Ecopsychology, The Ecologist, The Nation, Harper’s and other magazines. She lives with her husband, Andrew Gardner, in rural northeastern Pennsylvania, a region currently under exploitation by natural gas companies.
Image Credit:
- Rosa Parks Bus Seat: Milwaukee County Transit System
MORE RADICAL JOY REVEALED
She addresses the cedar…
One simple and meaningful way to find and make beauty for a place—and actually to do both at the same time—is to praise it. Praising a clearcut forest, a littered beach, a raccoon killed by a [...]
Buddhist Scholar: Seek Happiness in Hard Times
According to Buddhist author and psychologist Jack Kornfield, happiness is not a feeling or a series of pleasures, it is "a deep sense of well-being and an appreciation for life itself, with all of its [...]
Ceremony Replaces Shyness
It's not uncommon that people feel a little bit shy and awkward when they do their first—or even their second or third—Global Earth Exchange. There is little precedent, after all, for going out to a [...]
JOIN OUR NEWSLETTER
Radical Joy Revealed is a weekly message of inspiration about finding and making beauty in wounded places.