A Civil Rights icon died yesterday. Rosa Parks was 92, and was 50 years beyond taking a stand that changed America.

I grew up during the turbulent era of the fight for Civil Rights in the Deep South. I love my part of the country, but I’m not proud of that little bit of history.

I remember my mother being afraid to take my brother and I downtown because of all the “trouble” at the time. I was only 7 or 8 years old, but it was very tense, and I don’t remember that being from the trouble the “blacks” were causing — the city government and KKK-types were the ones making all the ruckus. Blacks just wanted to sit where they wanted on buses that cost them as much to ride as it did white folks.

I remember drinking from the “Whites Only” water fountains at Sears and other locations.

I remember playing in my yard when a station wagon rolled by tossing things out the window onto people’s lawns. When I picked it up, it turned out to be a silver pig-iron paperweight of a bull with Eugene “Bull” Connor stamped on the side.

I remember being in a race riot during high school. A bunch of idiots of one color squared off against a bunch of idiots of another color and decided to fight over which was the better color, I suppose. All I remember was that it happened in the auditorium during a pep rally and I got creamed when somebody who was obviously more scared than I was ran over me as I was making my way through a row of seats trying to get the heck out of there.

Today I work in Birmingham just a few blocks from where blacks staged a sit-in at a lunch counter, and a few blocks in a different direction from the site of the 16th Street Church bombing. He wouldn’t remember me, but I have in the past had a passing acquaintance with Chris McNair, former Jefferson County Commissioner, and father of one of the precious lives lost in that terrible tragedy.

I’ve visited the Civil Rights museum right across the street from where the bombing occurred.

I’ve watched justice slowly happen for those four children as some of those responsible for their deaths have been brought to court, tried, and convicted.

Yep, things have changed around here. I go to church with blacks, have them as friends, work with them, and have had them teach me things I really needed to know (thank you La Shawn Barber). My wife and I even managed to save the life of a little black child when a scared young girl took us into her confidence and allowed us to minister to her and let her make the decision to give her child up for adoption rather than aborting it.

I happen to believe that Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech was anointed of God, and am outraged that Je$$e Jack$on, Al $harpton, and Calyp$o Louie Farrakhan have so perverted King’s desire that his children “be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

Rosa, maybe you never expected to hear this from a white Southern boy, but thank you. You made America a better place. May leaders of all colors live up to your high standard.

TD