Rosa Parks has kicked the bucket! My God. I'm a person now who has lived in the post-Parks era. I'm not being flippant about this, it really freaks me out--I mean, I know that celebrities and historical figures die, and that Rosa Parks was old even before I was born, but now she's DEAD.
All the books I read in school said things at the end like "Rosa Parks currently lives in Detroit with her dog hush-and-hush," and her being in the present tense like that made her stand out for me in a very positive way. A "living change" sort of way. Rosa Parks was the figure who made me see that the Civil Rights movement was still going forward; she was both history and reality and through her I was able to discover that one was simply the product of the other.
But now she's dead. The next generation's little kids will learn about Rosa Parks the same way they learn about George Washington and Irving Berlin, as a person from that "other" period, that dusty garage full of cardboard cut-outs and connect-the-paper-tabs revolutions, History.
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