An important concept I learned over the last few short years, which actually comes from Luke 10:29-63 (the parable of the Good Samaritan).
In the parable a Lawyer (a teacher/expert in the laws of Moses) asks Christ who his neighbor was. And Christ went ahead to give the parable of how a man was waylaid by robbers and left for dead by the side of the road.
The first person to come by was a priest, who the bible says was riding (aparently a donkey, horse ....something). He could have helped the person, but he didn't.
The next person was a Levite (Levites were descendants of Levi and helped priests serve the Lord in the temple). Did he help the wounded man? No, he kept hsi distance, and walked on.
The third person to walk by was a Samaritan. Now, this was the worst type of person to come by ...at least for a wounded Jew. Samaritans were anathema for Jews, and it was 'unclean' to even eat anything touched by them (actually in John 4:9 Christ is asked by the Samaritan woman by the well how come he is not troubled asking for a drink of water from a Samaritan woman). In essence Samaritans were despised by the Jews, and on their part they despised the Jews, and thus there was really no chance of any help coming from the Samaritan.
HOWEVER it was the Samaritan who picked up the wounded man.
It was the Samaritan who bandaged and tended his wounds with oil and wine (which is a subtle hit at the priest and the Levite, since they poured oil and wine in the temple to the Lord, yet wouldn't help their fellow man dying by the road....in Jewish tradition that is a slap to the face of the priest and Levite).
It was the Samaritan who put the wounded Jew on his beast and transported him to an inn.
And it was the Samaritan who paid the inn-keeper money to tend for the man, and then even added that when he came back he would pay any extra that was necssary.
The Samaritan.
And in verse 63 Christ says the following:"Which of these three do you think proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell into the robbers' hands?"
Basically it boils down to this. Rosa PArks was a true American hero. Was she a communist? I do not know about that, and to be honest I couldn't care a whit less about that. She could have been the co-writer of Marxist doctrine and I wouldn't even notice THAT!
And why?
Well, because there were very very very very many people ....millions in fact .....who could have done something, anything, to rectify some of the injustices that were going on back then, but they did nothing. Rosa Parks was by no means the only person who stood up. There were many more, of all races (some, again of all races, who paid for it with their lives). But myriads more did nothing.
Hence I cannot with good conscience try to dab the woman with 'she was a communist tab' when she did what many more should have done. Communist or not, man or woman, black or white, she was, and will always be, a true American hero.
And a true neighbor.
I could give a damn myself. How many people who called themselves christians and 'true Americans' didn't do anything and thought 'that's how things are supposed to be'.
The reason the NAACP picked Rosa Parks as the "test case" to be publicized was that she has the lowest vulnerability to the expected smear campaign. This, shall we say, erodes the credibility of certain commentators on this thread.