This past week’s remembrances and services for Rosa Parks should remind us that despite our best research, insights, plans and implementation prowess it is still individuals on which successful social change rests. It is likewise important to remember, as Juan Williams pointed out in a recent column, that the story of Rosa Parks wasn’t simply a story of a woman who just sat still on a bus.
Before that one moment of defiance on the bus she was a civil rights activist who had long fought to get voting rights for black people in Alabama. Apparently it is too confusing to mention that as far back as 1943 she had refused to follow the rules requiring black people to enter city buses through the back door. And it invites too much complexity to mention that in the late 40's, as an official of the local branch of the N.A.A.C.P., she was forming a coalition with a group of black and white women in Montgomery to fight segregated seating on city buses.
And Ms. Parks wasn’t the only activist and social change agent honored this week. Muktar Mai, the Pakistani woman who was gang-raped at the orders of a tribal council after her 13 year-old brother was accused of flirting with a 28 year-old woman, was honored by Glamour magazine as Woman of the Year. The award recognized her braving social stigma by publicizing her assault and using international attention to set up a girls school in her rural community.
"This award is a victory for poor women; it's a victory for all women," Mai said at the Wednesday night Lincoln Center ceremony after actress Brooke Shields presented her award. She said her motto is: "End oppression with education." [link] [link]
Continuing the recognition of individual social change agents, this week’s issue of Time magazine profiled 16 individuals who are making a difference in global health as part of the coverage of the TIME Global Health Summit
Indeed, social change is all around us if we stop and look for the people and not just the programs.
Which brings me to one of my favorite quotes from an African American man who volunteered to drive a bus during the often tumultuous integration of Boston schools as reported by Robert Coles in Lives of Moral Leadership: “It’s important to be busy…but if you don’t find the time to change the world, then you’re busy keeping it the way it is.”
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