Celebrate Rosa Parks

Rosa Parks mugshot Rosa Parks (Feb. 4, 1913 – Oct. 24, 2005)

We should not let the day pass without taking a moment to honor Rosa Parks (Feb 4th 1913 – Oct 24th 2005) who would be 102-years old today. She was one of the giants of the Civil Rights Movement known best for defying segregation by refusing to give up her seat to a white person in the Black section of a public bus on December 1st 1955. When she refused the order of the bus driver she was arrested & taken away.

She was not an accidental heroine but a long-time radical civil rights activist who knew exactly what she was doing. She was charged & found guilty of disorderly conduct but appealed her conviction to challenge the legality of segregation.

In a 1992 interview on NPR she said: “I did not want to be mistreated, I did not want to be deprived of a seat that I had paid for. It was just time… there was opportunity for me to take a stand to express the way I felt about being treated in that manner. I had not planned to get arrested. I had plenty to do without having to end up in jail. But when I had to face that decision, I didn’t hesitate to do so because I felt that we had endured that too long. The more we gave in, the more we complied with that kind of treatment, the more oppressive it became.”

This is her Alabama mugshot from an arrest in February 1956 during the Montgomery bus boycott which she was part of organizing. She remained a civil rights activist her entire life.
Our deepest respect for her memory & continuing inspiration.

Portrait of child from Hunza country, Pakistan

Michaud Feb 4 2015

This 1974 photo is of a child in Hunza country, Pakistan, from “La route de Samarkand” by photographers Roland & Sabrina Michaud. Roland (who is French) & Sabrina (Moroccan) are now in their 70s & 80s & still active photographers. For many years they traveled throughout the Middle East taking photos, including many character studies as magnificent as this one entitled “Fillette à la rose.” Although they were surely of the era, it’s not certain their intention was Orientalist, that is, with a colonial attitude toward their subjects.

Thousands of photos were taken of Native Americans at the turn of 19th to 20th century (at the end of the wars of Indian extermination in the US West) which were commissioned by the ruling elite to document a dying people for anthropological purposes. The photos of Native Americans are stunning but glorified images because at the time most tribes had been either exterminated or driven on to reservations living in squalid conditions.

One hates to question the motives of such a beautiful photo of a child. We didn’t invent the past but merely want to understand it. Since we don’t know, we can simply savor this remarkable image of a child now likely in her 50s.