On December 1, 1955, a tired black seamstress named Rosa Parks defied what was regarded as a polite custom when she refused to surrender her seat to a white man. Under the “Jim Crow” system of racial discrimination, her Montgomery, Alabama, bus driver had the legal right to move her farther back in the bus to make room for this man, but Rosa refused, defying both authority and regional standards of decorum. She was arrested, but she went into custody knowing that social conventions and the laws they generated were accountable to higher principles rooted in God’s justice. And so began the successful, 381-day, Montgomery Bus Boycott, which launched the American Civil Rights Movement.
Those racist standards had been in place for half a century. When federal troops withdrew from the Reconstructed South in 1877 following the Civil War, the South experienced a degree of racial harmony as liberals, conservatives, and populists fended off the most extreme forms of racism in legal codes. But as political alliances began to deteriorate, office seekers turned to the rhetoric of white supremacy to garner votes from a Caucasian electorate. Blacks were relegated to the social ladder’s lowest rung, and laws requiring racial separation in education, public transportation, recreation facilities, hospitals, orphanages, prisons, and asylums kept them there. Even funeral homes, morgues, and cemeteries were plagued by racial bigotry.
With these laws came a set of unholy social norms, canons of “decency” and “good behavior.” Those who ignored them were deemed “uppity” and worse. Nevertheless, Rosa Parks and many others knew that some standards of conventional civility were morally pernicious, so they pressed until laws and customs changed. In Greensboro and Nashville, for instance, blacks defied rules allowing only whites at lunch counters. Black high-school students in Little Rock pressed for admission to white schools where they were not wanted, and black Freedom Riders entered “whites only” waiting rooms in bus terminals across the Deep South. Their defiance paid off when federal legislation banned discrimination in employment practices and public accommodations in addition to protecting voting rights for all Americans.
When segregationists asked why civil rights activists could not wait for customs and laws to change slowly, Baptist pastor Martin Luther King Jr. responded, “[W]hen your wife and mother are never given the respected title ‘Mrs.’; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro… then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.” He added bluntly, “I can urge men to disobey segregation ordinances because they are morally wrong.”
Developmental psychologists such as Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg have observed that children learn their morals, their sense of right and wrong, sequentially. In the beginning, they are concerned largely with avoiding punishment and getting rewards. In time, they shift their focus to the importance of orderliness, peace, and a favorable reputation – being counted “good” and “nice.” All of these have their place, but if one gets stuck at this level, he or she will automatically condemn anyone who creates a fuss or introduces irritants into society – or into the church, for that matter. Prophetic voices and “divisive” behavior are despised. But as people continue to grow in moral understanding, they realize that certain rules of etiquette and propriety can cover for evil and that they must be confronted for the sake of genuine decency.
Today, people of conscience who watch news footage from Rosa Parks’s day are shocked by the violence inflicted on those who sought simple, racial justice – the crack of billy clubs and the blast of fire hoses. But none should miss the quieter brutality of the “genteel” manners enabling the persecutors and ostracizing righteous “troublemakers.” Yes, it took courage for civil rights demonstrators to face down snarling, lunging police dogs, but they were also heroic for becoming social outcasts in a culture whose racial manners were tools of oppression.
-The BibleMesh Team
