Winning is all that counts
Principles are often overlooked in striving for success. It never ceases to amaze me how the need to be successful is more important than the need to be ethical, even if your actions directly contradict the ethics of your cause. This is true whether you are describing an individual, a corporation, a religion or a country.
I bring to your attention, a now 70 year old black woman Claudette Colvin. On March 2 1955 Colvin, then a 15 year old black girl in Montgomery Alabama was riding the bus home from school, faced a driver who demanded that she give up her seat to a middle-aged white woman, even though three other seats in the row were empty, one beside her, and two others across the aisle.” If she sat down in the same row as me, it meant I was as good as her”, Colvin said. The young girl was dragged off the bus and handcuffed. The arrest was big news and black leaders, among them Martin Luther King, jumped at the opportunity to use her case to fight the segregation laws in the courts. It was not until Dec 1 of the same year that Rosa Parks, a seasoned veteran of the NAACP( it was unknown to me that she was a secretary at the NAACP) refused to go to the back of the bus as demanded and became according to TIME magazine one of the 100 most important people of the 20th century. Calvin knew Rosa Parks, secretary of the NAACP in Montgomery, but she was passed over in favour of using Rosa because she had lighter skin colour and would be more acceptable to the white majority. My Ma told me “let Rosa be the one. White people aren’t going to bother Rosa- her skin is lighter than yours and they like her”
So here is the NAACP, fighting to outlaw discrimination because of colour, choosing the lighter colour of Rosa for the darker, feisty Claudette. It seems colour does matter for the NAACP.
