A short piece by Vu-Duc Vuong, a teacher and writer in the Bay Area.

THANK YOU, ROSA PARKS By Vu-Duc Vuong It is fitting that Congress welcomes Rosa Parks to lie in honor in the Capitol Rotunda before her funeral in Detroit last week. She is far more deserving of the honor than some men who had preceded her. The seamstress who refused to give up her seat to accommodate a white man on the bus on December 1, 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, lit the fire of the Civil Rights Movement that changed the United States forever and in fundamental ways. Here are a few landmarks to illustrate how much changes the Civil Rights Movement has brought to this country: Back in 1776, the founding fathers of the American Republic, who were all white and rich men, who mostly benefited from the labor of their black slaves, made a compromise among themselves and counted blacks as three-fifths of a person. They were counted for the purpose of allocating Congressional seats only, not for voting. Some eighty years later, Americans fought a bloody civil war to emancipate black slaves. Yet, Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan dominated the South, holding black people down with public lynching and the “separate but equal” treatment. In the first part of the 20th Century, lynching was common in many parts of the U.S. and often took on the atmosphere of a carnival. People gathered to watch black men beaten up and strung up in public places. They took pictures with the dangling bodies, as souvenirs. Even during World War II, when over a million black citizens fought to defend the U.S. and rescue the victims of Nazi Germany, they fought as second class citizens, in segregated units. And as soon as they returned to American soil, they found themselves right back in the racist, segregated, and inhuman system and were treated worse than the white prisoners of war held in this country. It was not until Brown v. Board of Education (1954) that segregated schools were outlawed, and in December the following year, Mrs. Parks ignited the full scale Civil Right struggle. As fate would have it, a young minister, named Martin Luther King, Jr., lined up behind her, supported her, and managed to steer the movement toward its legislative successes in 1964 with the Civil Rights Act and in 1965 with the Voting Rights Act. What does it have to do with immigrants? As an immigrant, I owe my being here in great part to the Civil Rights Movement. It was this non-violent fight for equality and dignity that exposed the long-standing injustices in the American society, that called out for redress, and that set the stage for other self-determination movements in this country. Borrowing a page from the Movement, women organized and demanded equality; Native Americans asserted their sovereignty; various ethnic groups threw away their second class status; gays and lesbians walked out of the closet with pride; the elderly and the disabled reclaimed their dignity and quality of life. To name just a few. In this process, the Civil Rights Movement also trained its spotlight on another fundamental injustice: limiting immigration to mostly European stock. After taking the Southwest and California from Mexico in 1848, just before the Gold Rush, The American Congress passed the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, and followed it by the Gentlemen’s Agreement in 1910 to divert Japanese laborers to Hawaii instead of the mainland. Congress then practically sealed the border to non-whites with the 1924 Immigration Act, a law that set an immigration quota in order to maintain the ethnic composition of the U.S. population at the level of the 1890 Census. The Civil Rights Movement and the spirit of the 1960’s exposed this race-based immigration policy as just another Jim Crow law. The resulting 1965 Immigration Act, which opened the door to immigrants from every continent, went into effect in 1968. And the rest, as we say, is history. For the last three decades under this new law, 85% of immigrants to the U.S. hailed from Asia, Latin America, and Africa. European, Canadian and Australian immigrants made up the rest. The impact on American society has been quick and spectacular. Outside of Hawaii, San Francisco became a non-white majority city in 1990, followed by the state of California in 2000. And this year, Texas became the fourth state with a non-white majority. The Census Bureau predicts that, given current life span, birth and death rates, and immigration patterns, the United States will have a non-white majority around 2050. I often call this change in immigration law the Third American Revolution — that of Diversity — after the First one for Independence and the Second for Equality. And I sometimes wonder, bemusedly, how would Jefferson, Washington, Franklin and the rest of the founding fathers react had they realized that the country they tried so hard to build in the European and Judeo-Christian mold, has become a tapestry incorporating every color, culture and faith of this planet. They may get a lesson in tolerance and harmony. In this context, Rosa Parks, by keeping her seat on the bus on that fateful day, indeed ignited a social revolution that exploded, like fireworks in a dark night, into a multitude of other social changes that forever restructure the composition and dynamics of the United States. She now belongs in the pantheon of heroes who built this country into a better and more just society.

Related Posts:

• Drudge on Miers (October, 2005)
• Fine the Citizens (April, 2006)
• immigration bill protesters (April, 2006)
• An unlikely Australian marriage ally (February, 2006)
• Substance vs. Procedure (May, 2008)

This entry was posted on Monday, November 7th, 2005 at 9:51 am and is filed under politics, society. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.