Twanna A. Hines @ FUNKYBROWNCHICK.com | sex. dating. relationships.

Rosa Parks: 1913 – 2005

It’s 1955. And, it’s a great year for arts & entertainment. Rebel Without a Cause, East of Eden, Les Diaboliques and The Seven Year Itch reel across silver screens. In a fit of confusion, the Oscars (still bestowing two awards for Best Cinematography — one for color and one for black and white) award the top actor’s prize to Ernest Borgnine, thus snubbing James Dean, Frank Sinatra and others. And, although no one knows these tiny little newborns yet—Eddie Van Halen, John Grisham, Yo-Yo Ma, Billy Bob Thornton, Whoopi Goldberg, Chow Yun-Fat, and Arsenio Hall—they’ve just been born into what will eventually become lives of F.A.M.E.

The ink is still drying on Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, Nabokov’s Lolita, and the first edition of the Guinness Book of Records.

Alan Freed produces the world’s first rock and roll concert in New York City. While Louis Armstrong and Frank Sinatra’s songs top the charts, John Coltrane, Johnny Cash, Patsy Cline, Little Richard, and Simon & Garfunkel are just starting their careers.

In a strange land far far away (Anaheim, California), Disneyland opens it doors to its first customers. Doors also open in an even stranger land (Alabama) as Rosa Parks changes the course of American history when she defies American Jim Crow Laws. Bringing to mind a singular paragraph of the Declaration of Independence (”[w]e hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain [inalienable] Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness … ”), Parks practices and teaches one the greatest of arts of them all: The Art of Compassion.