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Jewish World Review Oct. 28, 2005 / 25 Tishrei, 5766 Remembering the Jean D'Arc of the Civil Rights Movement By Tony Snow
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Rosa Parks, the Jean D'Arc of the Civil
Rights Movement, died this week at the age of 92. Unfortunately, the
movement to which she had devoted her energies and name died long before.
Parks famously refused to surrender her seat on the Cleveland
Street bus in Montgomery, Ala., on a winter afternoon 50 years ago. Local
officials booked her and fined her $10 plus $4 in court costs.
She invited arrest to draw attention to the idiocy of enforced
segregation, and worked with a young Martin Luther King Jr. to overturn
Montgomery's antediluvian transportations laws.
It worked. Parks set a standard for grace and common sense, and
inspired a rapt nation.
That was then. This week, as she breathed her last, American
"civil rights" leaders were haggling over something far less exalted: The
right to wear bling.
National Basketball Association Commissioner David Stern decreed
that NBA players must wear at least business-casual attire when traveling
with their teams or appearing in basketball arenas. He also banned chains,
necklaces and related gewgaws, along with 'do rags, baseball caps and other
such headgear.
Stern figured the league shouldn't promote a gangsta culture
that exalts murder, encourages the abuse of women, celebrates drug use and
sneers at the very values that can help kids escape the tyranny of life in
crime-riddled, dysfunctional neighborhoods.
He was branded a racist on the odd theory that gangsta culture
expresses something valuable about black people. Not even the Ku Klux Klan
would claim that blacks are predisposed to mayhem, ignorance and early
death. That, apparently, has been left to the boneheads who claim title to
Rosa Parks' cause.
Ironically, Parks got a taste of this "authentic" culture some
years ago, when a young man assaulted her on a Detroit street. The goon
apparently cared less about her accomplishments than that she was carrying a
purse.
While millionaire basketball stars carped, North Carolina State
University distanced itself from Kamau Kambon, an "occasional" professor in
the university's African Studies Program.
Kambon livened a debate about race relations in the wake of
Hurricane Katrina by blaming whitey for everything and thundering: "We have
to exterminate white people off the face of the planet. ...
"We just have to set up our own system and stop playing and get
very serious and not be diverted from coming up with the solution to the
problem, and the problem on the planet is white people."
(While some participants sat numbly onstage, civil-rights
activist Lawrence Guyott saved the day by slamming Kambon — something it
took N.C. State nearly a fortnight to do.)
Also this week, The Washington Post published a review of Don
Diva, described as "a magazine about gangsters ... for gangsters — and
wannabe gangsters," meaning drug-dealing gang-bangers.
The periodical regularly sports two covers — a tame one with a
picture of a rapper or other celebrity; the other, "a scene of gangster
life: a staged shot of kids cooking up crack cocaine ... or an authentic
photo of a dead Chicago dope dealer laid out in a coffin built to resemble
his Cadillac El Dorado."
The advice column tells how to beat a money-laundering rap, get
the hottest paraphernalia and procure motor vehicles that resist bullets.
And the sex columns encourage women to practice submission and men to go
wild. Says publisher Tiffany Chiles: "Most of the criminals we write about
end up dead or in prison. To say that's glorifying is to say my readers are
stupid. We have to shed light on things that are happening."
Finally, this: Condoleezza Rice returned to her home town of
Birmingham, Ala., only to face jeers from some "civil rights" hucksters.
Rice, the product of an intact home where parents loved and nurtured their
daughter, apparently lived too "sheltered" a life for her critics — despite
the fact that she was friends with Denise McNair, one of four girls murdered
in the 1964 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church. (The only time I have
seen Rice tear up was when I unexpectedly asked her about Denise McNair
during a televised interview five years ago.)
Yet if anybody deserves the title of Rosa Parks' rightful heir,
it is Condoleezza Rice, who conducts herself without bitterness or
self-pity, and carries herself with graceful assurance. That, after all, was
what the Montgomery Bus Boycott was all about. It was about the right to
succeed — not the right to wear bling.
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Comment on JWR contributor, and syndicated talk show host, Tony Snow's column by clicking here. © 2005, Creators Syndicate, Inc |
Mitch Albom | |||||||||||
