All honor to Rosa Parks for having the courage to do what she did.

And by the way: I suppose the news stories will tell you that she was just an ordinary person, a local seamstress, who just got tired one day and sat down in a "White" bus seat and refused to get up.

Utter nonsense, of course.

She was an officer of the local NAACP, and had received training in how to fight segregation at the far Left wing Highlander Folk School.

The Far Right made a big deal of this and shrieked about "Communist infiltration" and "outside agitators".

And they were right! The struggle for Black freedom in the South did benefit from the advice, participation, and material support of outside forces, some of them Communists. Conservatives should have been there too, but sadly we weren't.

And the Federal Government certainly had a hand in things too, sending the Army in at various points to defend Blacks threatened by the racists. (Google on Little Rock, 1957.)

The real point is that struggles for freedom are seldom purely spontaneous. They need to be organized and led by dedicated people supported by organizations which have expertise and experience.

The struggle for freedom in Third World tyrannies will also not be spontaneous. It needs our support: advice, money, training, and sometimes, guns and soldiers, just as the Southern Freedom Struggle had.

It's ironic that today liberals turn their back on this struggle, and conservatives champion it.

Doug