Quiet
Courage

Did You Use Courage?
Think of a time when you have been with friends and they did something you didn’t think was right or fair.  Think of how you felt and what you did.  Decide if what you did took courage.  If you think it did, decide why.  Talk this over with a few of your classmates, and see if they have had similar things happen to them.  Find out how they responded. (I,5)
Most of the time people must have courage to stand up and fight for what they believe in.  But there is more than one way to fight for what you think is right.

Mohandas Gandhi was a leader of India.  He was a small man who was not physically strong but he had a strong belief in justice.
The Indian people were not free to run their own country.  They were not ruled fairly by the white British.  Many of the people wanted to fight the British.
Gandhi said. “If we hurt them as they are hurting us, then we are just as bad as they are.  Then there will be two evils instead of one.”
Instead of physically fighting, Gandhi used “soul force” a peaceful kind of fighting.  Gandhi and his followers would go to a crowded part of a city and lie down in the street as if they were dead.  Traffic would stop.  Business would stop.  Everything had to stop.  The British 
soldiers would come and drag them away.  Gandhi and his followers never said an unkind word.  Then they would the same thing again.

Soon people around the world heard about Gandhi and admired his courage.  They began to understand what the Indians were saying through their peaceful resistance.  The Indians wanted the British out of their country.
When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was studying to be a minister he read about Mohandas Gandhi.  King agreed with soul-force thinking.
Years later Dr. King became a minister in Montgomery Alabama.  An event occurred there that made Dr. King’s feelings about soul force known all over the world.

Many unfair laws were practiced in Montgomery.  One involved the use of the buses.  Black people were forced to walk in the front door of a bus, pay their fare, walk back out and get on again through the back door.  They had to fill the bus starting from the rear.  If the bus was full and a white person wanted to ride a black person had to stand up to make a seat available.
One afternoon Mrs. Rosa Parks, a black woman, boarded a bus.  She was ordered to give up her seat to a white man.  She refused to get up.  She was arrested.
When Dr. King heard what happened to Rosa Parks he decided the unfair treatment of black people had to stop.  The time to protest had come.
Dr. King called a meeting of the black people in Montgomery.  They all decided to stop using the buses.
Many times Dr. King and his followers were threatened.  But they stayed off the buses.  Once a bomb was tossed through a window 

of Dr. King’s home.  But they still stayed off the buses.  The black people of Montgomery were fighting the way Gandhi did.  They were using soul force.
A year after the bus boycott began the Supreme Court of the United States made a decision.  The Montgomery Bus Company could no longer tell people where to sit.  Martin Luther King Jr. had used a powerful, quiet courage to win an important victory.

It Happened
in Montgomery
			by Phil W. Petrie
			For Rosa Parks

Then he slammed on the brakes –
Turned around and grumbled.

But she was tired that day.
Weariness was in her bones.
And so the thing she’s done yesterday.
And yesteryear.
On her workdays.
Churchdays.
Nothing-to-do-guess-I’ll-go-and-visit Sister Annie Days-

She felt she’d never do again.

And he growled once more.

So she said:
No sir … I’m stayin’ right here.

And he gruffly grabbed her.
Pulled and pushed her –
Then sharply shoved her through the doors.

The news slushed through the littered streets –
Slipped into the crowded churches.
Slimmered onto the un-magnolied side of town
While the men talked and talked and talked.

She –
Who was tired that day.
Cried and sobbed that she was glad she’d done it.
That her soul was satisfied.

That Lord know,
A little walkin’ never hurt anybody:

That in one of those unplanned, unexpected,  Unadorned moments –
A weary woman turned the page of History.