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In yearly letter to King, bishop remembers Rosa Parks' impact

Jan. 6, 2006

NOTE: A photograph is available at http://umns.umc.org.

By United Methodist News Service

Each year, United Methodist Bishop Woodie W. White writes a "birthday"
letter to the late Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. about the progress of
racial equality in the United States. Now retired and serving as
bishop-in-residence at United Methodist-related Candler School of
Theology in Atlanta, White was the first top staff executive of the
denomination's racial equality monitoring agency, the Commission on
Religion and Race. King's birthday is Jan. 15, and Americans honor his
memory on the third Monday of the month.

Dear Martin:

This year I begin this letter with considerable sadness. Mrs. Rosa
Parks' recent death has caused a deep sense of grief. It is surprising
to observe how another's death impacts us. You really can never tell how
you will respond to death. You simply have to wait.

When I learned Mrs. Parks had died, I was momentarily numbed. Shocked
but not surprised. She had been ill for some time, and after all, she
was 92. A long and good life. But as the days went on, I found myself
falling into a pit of grief that seemed to have no bottom. It was a
"silent and alone" mourning. Despite my efforts at self-control, tears
came unpredictably. Martin, it was painful.

I was flooded with memories. It is still difficult to believe that it
was 50 years ago on Dec. 1, 1955, that Mrs. Parks - quiet, and much
admired and respected but unknown beyond her Montgomery, Ala., community
- was catapulted into history. She refused to give up her seat on a bus
to a white man as custom and law required.

I was attending a small Methodist college in the South at the time and
tasting firsthand the oppressive nature of racism and bigotry in the
region. Actually, it was not new to me, despite the fact that I was born
and reared in New York City. As a boy, I spent my summer months in a
border state with my grandparents and family. It was as rigidly
segregated as any state in the Deep South. And of course, I would learn
the meaning of racism Northern style!

You had just begun your pastorate at Montgomery's Dexter Avenue Baptist
Church. The black community, outraged at the treatment and arrest of
Mrs. Parks, knew something dramatic had to be done. Then E.D. Nixon,
activist and courageous NAACP leader, and Ralph Abernathy came to you
and asked that you lead a new organization, the Montgomery Improvement
Association.

The historic Montgomery boycott, which continued for a year, changed not
just Montgomery but the nation. There has not been anything comparable
to it to this day.

Rosa Parks, now affectionately called the "Mother of the Civil Rights
Movement" for that simple yet dangerous act, accelerated the movement to
end Jim Crow and legal segregation in this nation. She was and is so
important to so many of us who remember what it meant to be a black
American in 1955.

Martin, I think many younger people, and perhaps those not so young, did
not understand our outrage and offense when Rosa Parks' action was made
the butt of jokes in a popular movie a couple of years ago. We knew the
significance of that act of saying "no" to a white person in the Deep
South in 1955! We remember the daily humiliation experienced in many
communities because your skin was black and not white.

It was a different America! Clearly we are not where we should be in
this nation that prides itself as a model of democracy, but we are no
longer where we were in those days of raw, vile prejudice, hatred and
segregation. You remember. Not being able to use a public restroom or
drink from a water fountain in many communities. Not being able to buy a
house or rent an apartment where you had the means to do so. In some
instances, not being able to try on clothes in a department store before
you purchased them. And in some places, not being able to vote.

Many parents knew the heartbreak of telling a child he or she could not
go to the park or romp in the playground, or swim in the community
swimming pool. Black Americans experienced so many acts of racism, North
and South. Martin, I remember! And it changed because of the courageous
actions of those like Rosa Parks, and efforts of white and black people
to create a new landscape of American life. Because of you!

In death, Rosa Parks was honored by this nation in a way she was not in
life. Her body laid in state in the rotunda of the nation's Capitol, the
first woman to be so honored. National leaders, including the president,
came to pay their respects to this woman of genuine courage and
humility. A statue of her likeness will be commissioned and placed in
the Hall of Statues in the Capitol.

While these honors bestowed upon Mrs. Rosa Parks are cause for
rejoicing, I have this overwhelming sadness. Perhaps it is so, Martin,
because in this death I remember others. Those who touched my life and
indeed made a difference in American life. I remember them today; their
faces and voices are vivid and clear: Ella Baker, who mentored me when I
was an officer in the New York NAACP Youth Council; Gloster Current,
Channing H. Tobias and Anna Hedgeman, who encouraged and supported me
when I went off to college; Walter White; Lester Granger; James Farmer;
A. Phillip Randolph; Fannie Lou Hammer; Whitney Young; Roy Wilkins. And
you.

And so many others. Gone. It is a heavy grief today, Martin.

This year, Martin, on your birthday, I remember. I simply remember. In
sadness. In gratitude. In hope. Yet because I remember, I have not the
slightest doubt that

WE SHALL OVERCOME.

Woodie
Atlanta, Georgia
January 2006

News media contact: Kathy L. Gilbert or Linda Green, Nashville, Tenn.,
(615) 742-5470 or newsdesk@umcom.org.

********************

United Methodist News Service
Photos and stories also available at:
http://umns.umc.org

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