Today is the 60th Anniversary of Rosa Parks refusal to give her seat to a white man. I never met her, but I did meet Annie Lee Cooper.
For several years I traveled the country with many opportunities to speak to teenagers. One of my favorite places of working with kids was Selma, Alabama. I spent a week there and met a lady named Annie Lee Cooper. She was kind of famous for punching a Sheriff, but her story is much deeper than one confrontation with the law, if he really was the law.
I held the microphone as Mrs. Cooper told her story. We were in the Selma HS gym without about 500 or so people, mostly teenagers. Mrs. Cooper was 93 yrs old then. She hobbled up to the front of the gym floor to address the kids in the bleachers and told her story. She remembers when she was 13 yrs. old and white men on horses chased her and a friend. The friend was trampled and killed. Mrs. Cooper could still hear her friends screams 80 yrs later.
After the United States Government said that Black people could vote, Mrs. Cooper marched up the courthouse steps to vote and was met by the Sheriff who tried to stop her. She punched him in the face. The crowd roared when she said that. But you could see by the stoic expression in her face that what happened next wouldn't make anybody smile. A group of cops beat and kicked her, breaking many bones, ribs and her jaw as they pummeled her to the ground. They threw her in jail just the way she was. They wanted to charge her with attempted murder. To be a cop back then, all you had to do was be a white guy willing to beat a black person, there was no civil service test. I knelt in front of her the whole time, with one hand I held the microphone, with the other I wiped my tears.
Mrs. Cooper was one of the greatest human beings I ever met. I spent time at her home and interviewed her in front of kids who soaked up her pain and wisdom. In the end, she said she would drink the cup of suffering all over again, she gave Christ the credit. The dark parts of Mrs. Cooper's life make up a bright spot for the rest of us to cry about and learn from.
JLYASDW
