If she were still alive, Rosa Parks would be 100 today.
Rosa Parks has been described as the "first lady of civil rights" and the "mother of the freedom movement".
On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Parks refused to obey a bus driver's order to give up her seat in the colored section to a white passenger, after the white section was filled. Her act of defiance and the subsequent boycott of buses in Montgomery became important symbols of the modern Civil Rights Movement.
While history will tell us that Rosa, who was the secretary of the Montgomery branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, did not act independently, there is no doubt that her courage to defy widely accepted practices of discrimination was a personal strength and she suffered personally because of what she did.
The great significance of the civil rights movement was that Rosa Parks' actions and others who championed the cause, like Martin Luther King, maintained that non-violence was critical to their cause. Courage and justice not only involved standing up against discrimination, but doing it in a way that was filled with grace.
On Rosa Parks' 100th birthday it is appropriate that we spend a moment to reflect on courage and justice, which are values held by Baptistcare, and what these values mean for us in Western Australia in 2013.
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