Writers on the Range: Rosa Parks gives a talk in my small town

This past February during Black History month, writes Betsy Marston, about 100 people gathered on a cold Sunday at a community center in the little town of Paonia, Colorado. They were there to watch scholar-actor Becky Stone embody Rosa Parks, the 42-year-old woman whose arrest sparked the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott in 1955. She told the almost entirely white crowd, who hung on her every word, that tired feet didn't inspire her civil disobedience: She was tired of being disrespected. And with a united community behind her, she was ready to take a stand against Jim Crow segregation.