Who will follow Rosa?

By Tony Snow

Oct 28, 2005

Host, The Tony Snow Show

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Rosa Parks, the Jean D'Arc of the Civil Rights Movement, died this week at the age of 92. Unfortunately, the movement to which she had devoted her energies and name died long before.

Parks famously refused to surrender her seat on the Cleveland Street bus in Montgomery, Ala., on a winter afternoon 50 years ago. Local officials booked her and fined her $10 plus $4 in court costs.

She invited arrest to draw attention to the idiocy of enforced segregation, and worked with a young Martin Luther King Jr. to overturn Montgomery's antediluvian transportations laws.

It worked. Parks set a standard for grace and common sense, and inspired a rapt nation.

That was then. This week, as she breathed her last, American "civil rights" leaders were haggling over something far less exalted: The right to wear bling.

National Basketball Association Commissioner David Stern decreed that NBA players must wear at least business-casual attire when traveling with their teams or appearing in basketball arenas. He also banned chains, necklaces and related gewgaws, along with 'do rags, baseball caps and other such headgear.

Stern figured the league shouldn't promote a gangsta culture that exalts murder, encourages the abuse of women, celebrates drug use and sneers at the very values that can help kids escape the tyranny of life in crime-riddled, dysfunctional neighborhoods.

He was branded a racist on the odd theory that gangsta culture expresses something valuable about black people. Not even the Ku Klux Klan would claim that blacks are predisposed to mayhem, ignorance and early death. That, apparently, has been left to the boneheads who claim title to Rosa Parks' cause.

Ironically, Parks got a taste of this "authentic" culture some years ago, when a young man assaulted her on a Detroit street. The goon apparently cared less about her accomplishments than that she was carrying a purse.

While millionaire basketball stars carped, North Carolina State University distanced itself from Kamau Kambon, an "occasional" professor in the university's African Studies Program.

Kambon livened a debate about race relations in the wake of Hurricane Katrina by blaming whitey for everything and thundering: "We have to exterminate white people off the face of the planet. ...

"We just have to set up our own system and stop playing and get very serious and not be diverted from coming up with the solution to the problem, and the problem on the planet is white people."

(While some participants sat numbly onstage, civil-rights activist Lawrence Guyott saved the day by slamming Kambon -- something it took N.C. State nearly a fortnight to do.)

Also this week, The Washington Post published a review of Don Diva, described as "a magazine about gangsters ... for gangsters -- and wannabe gangsters," meaning drug-dealing gang-bangers.

The periodical regularly sports two covers -- a tame one with a picture of a rapper or other celebrity; the other, "a scene of gangster life: a staged shot of kids cooking up crack cocaine ... or an authentic photo of a dead Chicago dope dealer laid out in a coffin built to resemble his Cadillac El Dorado."

The advice column tells how to beat a money-laundering rap, get the hottest paraphernalia and procure motor vehicles that resist bullets. And the sex columns encourage women to practice submission and men to go wild. Says publisher Tiffany Chiles: "Most of the criminals we write about end up dead or in prison. To say that's glorifying is to say my readers are stupid. We have to shed light on things that are happening."

Finally, this: Condoleezza Rice returned to her home town of Birmingham, Ala., only to face jeers from some "civil rights" hucksters. Rice, the product of an intact home where parents loved and nurtured their daughter, apparently lived too "sheltered" a life for her critics -- despite the fact that she was friends with Denise McNair, one of four girls murdered in the 1964 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church. (The only time I have seen Rice tear up was when I unexpectedly asked her about Denise McNair during a televised interview five years ago.)

Yet if anybody deserves the title of Rosa Parks' rightful heir, it is Condoleezza Rice, who conducts herself without bitterness or self-pity, and carries herself with graceful assurance. That, after all, was what the Montgomery Bus Boycott was all about. It was about the right to succeed -- not the right to wear bling.

Find this story at: http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/tonysnow/2005/10/28/173245.html

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