Bravery and Non-Conformity -- the Term Paper

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By holding true to her own values, Parks became an example to other African-Americans in Montgomery, who may have been frightened to act in such an openly defiant manner. Her example touched the lives of others, without even her explicit intention. It is easy to remember Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. As an icon, as a man who was always great. But on 1955 King was only twenty-six years old, "the new pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery," and was then "drafted to head the Montgomery Improvement Association," the organization formed to direct the nascent civil rights struggle. As a result of his leadership during the boycott, he became a major civil rights leader. Parks actions touched King's life, Parks genius enabled King's emerging genius for leadership to be realized.

Parks did not seek the limelight. "I did not get on the bus to get arrested," she later said. "I got on the bus to go home." (Dove, 2003, p.1) She was a quiet, private woman. She did not desire, by nature, to stand as an iconoclast, the image of the typical Emersonian, defiant artist. Yet, she took the principle of Emerson to heart that "There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide." (Emerson, 1841) Park's act of civil disobedience was as private and quiet as her nature.

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But it was the very ordinary, private nature of her act that was so seismic. It drew attention to the fact that America was still so racist a society that a seamstress going home after a hard day's work could not peacefully assume her seat without being assaulted. An America made such an act of privately quiet yet assertive dignity a crime had forgotten its values and its promise made to African-Americans after the Civil War.

These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world." (Emerson, 1841) Society might counsel Parks to be afraid for her physical security, to think of her job that might lose, because she was only a private citizen. Others might counsel that she wait, consider, and engage in a more public and calculated action. Parks did not listen. And the world is a better place for her defiance.

Of Parks, poet Rita Dove wrote: "History is often portrayed as a string of arias in a grand opera, all baritone intrigues and tenor heroics. Some of the most tumultuous events, however, have been provoked by serendipity."(Dove, 2003, p.3) The serendipity of Parks' refusal to move, but also a character of self-reliance and bravery that was a lifetime in the making.

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