On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white passenger. She was not simply a tired seamstress who happened to say no. She had served as secretary of the local NAACP since 1943 and had disobeyed bus segregation rules before. Her arrest sparked a bus boycott, and about 17,000 Black residents stopped riding. The boycott lasted until the buses were desegregated 13 months later. Her quiet courage cost her. She lost her job and received death threats. Still, one woman who refused to move helped move a whole nation. Courage is often quiet, and it is usually prepared long before the moment comes.
In World War II, the Marines needed a code the enemy could not break. They decided to try one based on the Navajo language, which was unwritten and spoken by very few people outside the Navajo Nation. In May 1942 the first 29 Navajo recruits arrived at Camp Elliott near San Diego and built the code themselves, adding a layer of code words on top of their language. From then on, Code Talkers served in every major Marine operation in the Pacific. During the battle of Iwo Jima, six Code Talkers worked around the clock and sent more than 800 messages without a single error. Their signal officer said the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima without them. God can use what others overlook.
Mary Anning grew up poor in Lyme Regis on the English coast. Her father, a cabinetmaker, taught her to hunt and clean fossils on the beach, and when he died in 1810 the family sold her finds to pay debts. She had little schooling, but she taught herself geology and anatomy. In 1811 her brother found a strange skull, and in 1812 Mary dug out its five-meter skeleton. Scientists later named it Ichthyosaurus. In 1823 she found the first complete Plesiosaurus, and the famous scientist Georges Cuvier at first disputed it as a fake. Male scientists often bought her fossils and left her name out of their papers. She died in 1847, still short of money. God sees the hidden worker even when others take the credit.
At the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm, Jim Thorpe, a member of the Sac and Fox Nation, won both the pentathlon and the decathlon in dominant fashion. King Gustav V presented the medals and, as the story is famously told, called him the greatest athlete in the world. A few months later Thorpe was stripped of his medals because he had played minor league baseball, which broke the strict amateur rules of the day. In 1983 the IOC gave replica medals to his family but listed him only as a co-winner. Finally, on July 15, 2022, the 110th anniversary of his decathlon win, the IOC recognized him as the sole champion. Justice may take a long time. God sees what is right, and the record will one day be set straight.
Before Dick Fosbury, high jumpers went over the bar face down using the straddle or the scissors. As a teenager at Medford High in Oregon, Fosbury worked out a different way. He went over backward, head first. People thought it looked strange. A newspaper caption even said “Fosbury flops over bar,” and the name stuck. At the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, the crowd was so surprised by his style that they stopped cheering and just watched. The 21-year-old won gold with an Olympic record of 2.24 meters. Four years later, 28 of the 40 jumpers at the Olympics were using his flop. Doing the right thing a new way can look odd at first. Do not be afraid to be faithful even when you look different from everyone else.
