Thanks, Rosa Parks

Rosa Parks has died and is now lying in honor in the Capitol Building. Her refusing to sit at the back of the bus was one of the most public of the countless individual and group acts of courage that helped bring about the civil rights movement as well as the more general push for human dignity and decency that characterized the best parts of the 1950s and 1960s in this country. Those movements made my life better because I got to grow up in a world in which certain kinds of oppression were no longer acceptable, and I'm deeply grateful for that. Thank you, Rosa Parks, and thanks to all the courageous ones who are lying in honor only in spirit.