An excerpt from Tommy Airey’s “The Desperate Need for Non-Charismatic People.”

Today marks the 70th anniversary of forty-two-year-old Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat on that Jim Crow bus in Alabama. It was not a spontaneous act. It was not a mid-life crisis either. It was the choreographed move of a community conspiring against a system built and maintained by racial segregation.

Rosa Parks was the spark that lit
the 381-day movement wildfire called
the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

Rosa Parks was not new to the movement.
Rosa Parks was true to the movement.

In her early twenties, Rosa Parks courageously stood up to a white man attempting to rape her while she was working as a nanny. “If he wanted to kill me and rape a dead body,” she wrote years later, “he was welcome, but he would have to kill me first.”

In her early thirties, despite blatant efforts to threaten and intimidate her, Rosa Parks launched “The Alabama Committee for Equal Justice for Mrs. Recy Taylor” to defend a 24-year-old Black mother and sharecropper who was gang-raped by six white boys.

In her early forties, a few months before she refused to give up her seat, Rosa Parks attended a two-week training facilitated by Septima Clark at the Highlander School in Tennessee, one of the only places in the South that dared to host integrated meetings.

Highlander was started during the Great Depression by a white man named Myles Horton, a Union Seminary graduate who sought to multiply democratic leadership through the training of what he called “non-charismatic people.”

Myles Horton used this jargon to challenge the wide-spread belief that a just society would only come about when a well-intentioned, good-looking, smooth-talking alpha male was in charge.

Myles Horton knew that mustard seed revolutions spread through well-organized communities of peers, where everyone has a role, especially soft-spoken seamstresses like Rosa Parks and public-school teachers like Septima Clark, whose father was born into slavery.

Myles Horton knew that transformative leadership does not drip down from on high. It percolates from below.