Thirty seconds of lazy research shows that "Rosa" means either "beautiful rose" or "horse serpent." So much for that lead.
Much will be written about the death of civil rights pioneer—historical giant, really—Rosa Parks today. It's not often a historical icon dies while enjoying icon status. Perhaps this is because so many folks attain icon status by, well, dying. For me personally, my reaction was that of a teacher. Rosa's living was one of my go-to illustrations in class.
Even when I'm teaching banal technical writing, I manage to sneak a few of my personal loves into the assignments: history, astronomy, cooking, etc. This primarily stems from laziness. I'll be giving the students a technical description assignment, and I won't have prepared, so I'll tell them to research and write tech descriptions of words off the top of my head: aqueduct, seething, doppler shift, baleen, retrograde motion, etc. Invariably, I end up discussing their descriptions in class, and voila. For a day, I'm a histsciwrithomeec teacher. This being my class, the discussion immediately spins wildly out of control, and before you know it we'll have spent two lively hours discussing, say, the civil rights movement. Which brings us to Rosa Parks.
It's a tribute to Parks, among others, that your average 20 year old has no idea what the country was like two of their lifetimes ago. I think the black students have something of a grasp, but the others are hopeless. Rosa Parks is just an abstract name in a list to them— the list they memorized every year during Black History Month: Frederick Douglass, Dred Scott, Rosa Parks. I think they were friends! This lack of appreciation for how far we've come, how fast, how recently—in their parents' lifetimes—both appalls and delights me. The ignorance appalls, of course, but it's also delightful to think that maybe an entire generation considers racial equality a given, and inequality a historical demon slayed long before they were born, like slavery or plague or Nazism. Nevertheless, these kids have received an enormous gift. I want them to appreciate it. The lessons are less abstract if they're more immediate, if history is still living, so I would often point out that "You know, this wasn't that long ago. Rosa Parks is still alive. She's not just a name in a book." Alas. Among the many things lost today, we have lost that.
As part of W's overall cratering, his approval rating among black voters has fallen to 2%. This leads me to three questions:
- What was the margin of error? I'm betting around ± 2%.
- How many relatives does Condi Rice have, anyway?
(Cheap shot, I know. Don't write me.) - Didn't Strom Thurmond have an approval rating of 5% among blacks? And he was an old-time segregationist!