Photos By Terry Gilliam

 Bill Lhota, president and chief executive office of the Central Ohio Transit Authority

 

By Felix Hoover

For YourNewsColumbus.com

 

Appropriately, buses carried many people to the Rosa Parks Day tribute at the Ohio Historical Center.

Parks was the black woman whose defiance of a bus driver’s demand to yield her seat to a white passenger on Dec. 1, 1955, triggered the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The boycott ran for more than a year, ending on Dec. 21, 1956, and resulted in desegregation on buses in Alabama’s capital.

Youngsters from six central Ohio schools heard State Rep. Joyce Beatty’s recollection of that seminal period in the Civil Rights Movement.

“I can remember coming home from school and hearing about the arrest of Rosa Parks,” said Beatty, who hosted the event along with Bill Lhota, president and chief executive office of the Central Ohio Transit Authority, and William K. Laidlaw, executive director of the Ohio Historical Society.

Lhota, a history buff, remembered reading about Parks, but the speaker, the Rev. Robert Graetz, and his wife, Jeannie, learned about the arrest from the source.

Parks had been a neighbor of theirs when Rev. Graetz was pastor of Trinity Lutheran Church in Montgomery.

“She set a standard for all of us,” he said.

The Graetzes, who now split time between homes in Vinton County and Montgomery, were among the first whites in the early days of the Civil Rights Movement. Their activism resulted in a number of bombings at their home in Alabama, Rev. Graetz said.

“One time when our house was bombed, Rosa Parks cleaned up the broken glass dishes,” he said.

Beatty, who was ineligible to run for reelection because of term limits, said she was proud to have sponsored the legislation that makes December 1 Rosa Parks Day in Ohio.

Emcee Jerry Revish, news anchor at WBNS 10TV, was among several adults who commended the behavior of the students from Maize Elementary, Indianola Informal, Weinland Park Elementary, Beatty Park Elementary, William E. Miller (Newark) and Central College Math & Science Magnet (Westerville) schools.

Even before the elementary students heard Graetz and other dignitaries, they had some pretty good ideas about what makes a hero.

Columbus Schools Superintendent Gene Harris called several students to the microphone and received these responses:

“A hero helps people.”

“A hero can help save you.”

Reinforcing the notion that heroism isn’t an abstract concept that involves only people who have achieved fame, youngsters offered examples that can be practiced on the playground.

One student said, “If somebody falls, you can help them get up.”

Another said, “You can help people get the ball.”