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Discuss “Rosa Parks”

The late Rosa Parks has been called the matriarch of the civil rights movement. Her cool defiance on December 1, 1955, has served as the highest example in the fight for equality in our country. However, Rosa Parks? refusal to relinquish her bus seat is not what makes her deserving of the acclaim she has received.

We make a bad habit of perceiving things simply ? it?s just easier than trying to get at the nuances. But the cost of this mental laziness is real. Just as many of us simplify the significance of Rosa Parks, we tend to simplify and ? even worse ? downplay the continuing challenges of prejudice.

Rosa Parks was by no means the first to defy a bus driver?s commands. In March of 1955, a fifteen-year-old girl named Claudette Colvin had...

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