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Oct. 29th, 2005 03:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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On Hispanic Jews
Hispanics Uncovering Roots as Inquisition's 'Hidden' Jews
By SIMON ROMERO
HOUSTON, Oct. 28 - When she was growing up in a small town in southern Colorado, an area where her ancestors settled centuries ago when it was on the fringes of the northern frontier of New Spain, Bernadette Gonzalez always thought some of the stories about her family were unusual, if not bizarre.
Her grandmother, for instance, refused to travel on Saturday and would use a specific porcelain basin to drain blood out of meat before she cooked it. In one tale that particularly puzzled Ms. Gonzalez, 52, her grandfather called for a Jewish doctor to circumcise him while he was on his death bed in a hospital in Trinidad, Colo.
Only after Ms. Gonzalez moved to Houston to work as a lawyer and began discussing these tales with a Jewish colleague, she said, did "the pieces of the puzzle" start falling into place.
Ms. Gonzalez started researching her family history and concluded that her ancestors were Marranos, or Sephardic Jews, who had fled the Inquisition in Spain and in Mexico more than four centuries ago. Though raised in the Roman Catholic faith, Ms. Gonzalez felt a need to reconnect to her Jewish roots, so she converted to Judaism three years ago.
"I feel like I came home," said Ms. Gonzalez, who now often uses the first name Batya. "The fingerprints of my past were all around me, but I didn't know what they meant."
It is difficult to know precisely how many Hispanics are converting or adopting Jewish religious practices, but accounts of such embraces of Judaism are growing more common in parts of the Southwest. In Clear Lake, a suburb south of Houston, Rabbi Stuart Federow has overseen half a dozen conversions of Hispanics in recent years. In El Paso, Rabbi Stephen Leon said he had converted almost 40 Hispanic families since moving to Texas from New Jersey 19 years ago.
These conversions are the latest chapter in the story of the crypto-Jews, or hidden Jews, of the southwestern United States and northern Mexico, who are thought to be descended from the Sephardic Jews who began fleeing Spain more than 500 years ago. The story is being bolstered by recent historical research and advances in DNA testing that are said to reveal a prominent role played by crypto-Jews and their descendants in Spain's colonization of the Southwest.
For more than two decades, anecdotal evidence collected by researchers in New Mexico, Colorado and Texas suggested that some nominally Catholic families of Iberian descent had stealthily maintained Jewish customs throughout the centuries, including lighting candles on Friday evening, avoiding pork and having the Star of David inscribed on gravestones.
The whispers of hidden rituals coming from thoroughly Catholic communities were at times met with skepticism. One explanation for these seemingly Jewish customs was that evangelical Protestant sects active in the Southwest about a century ago had used Jewish imagery and Hebrew writing in their proselytizing, and that these symbols had become ingrained in isolated Hispanic communities.
Skepticism aside, some rabbis view assistance to or conversions of crypto-Jews as a responsibility. "The American Jewish community provided support in bringing Soviet, Albanian or Syrian Jews to the United States, and helping them in their transition," said Rabbi Leon of Congregation B'nai Zion, a Conservative congregation in El Paso. "I don't see how the crypto-Jews are any different."
Modern science may now be shedding new light on the history of the crypto-Jews after molecular anthropologists recently developed a DNA test of the male or Y chromosome that can indicate an ancestral connection to the Cohanim, a priestly class of Jews that traces its origin back more than 3,000 years to Aaron, the older brother of Moses.
Family Tree DNA, a Houston company that offers a Cohanim test to its male clients, gets about one inquiry a day from Hispanics interested in exploring the possibility of Jewish ancestry, said Bennett Greenspan, its founder and chief executive. Mr. Greenspan said about one in 10 of the Hispanic men tested by his company showed Semitic ancestry strongly suggesting a Jewish background. (Another divergent possibility is that the test might suggest North African Muslim ancestry.)
"The results have just blown me over, reminding me of something out of Kaifeng," Mr. Greenspan said, referring to the Chinese city of Kaifeng, where a small Jewish community persisted for about 1,000 years until the mid-19th century when it was almost completely assimilated. "Lots of Hispanic people tell me they're interested in something Jewish and they can't explain it. Well, this helps explain it."
Not everyone who discovers Jewish ancestry, either through genealogical research or DNA testing, has decided to convert to Judaism, but some Hispanics who have found links still feel drawn to incorporate Jewish customs into their life. For instance, the Rev. William Sanchez, 52, a Catholic priest in Albuquerque, spent years researching his family's past in New Mexico before a DNA test three years ago showed that he almost certainly had the Jewish Cohanim marker.
Since then, Father Sanchez has sought to educate his parishioners on the connections between Catholicism and Judaism, and has helped oversee the Nuevo Mexico Project, which tries to identify Sephardic ancestry among Hispanics from New Mexico. He has encouraged more than 100 of his parishioners to take DNA tests.
Father Sanchez has also introduced some Jewish customs at St. Edwins Church in Albuquerque, where he serves; he blew the shofar, or ram's horn, this month during the Yom Kippur holiday. At another parish where he used to work in rural northeastern New Mexico, in the village of Villanueva, he would hold an annual Passover supper.
"I have a pluralistic, not an antagonistic, view of our religions," Father Sanchez said.
Still, others feel they have to make a clean break upon exploring their Jewish roots. John García, a lawyer in El Paso whose family moved to the United States two generations ago from northern Mexico, said he had heard stories since he was a boy that his family had a Sephardic Jewish past.
He formally converted to Judaism in 2001 and last year had a bar mitzvah in El Paso, at the age of 53, together with five other crypto-Jews. These days Mr. García, a lawyer in the public defender's office in El Paso, never works on the Sabbath and is an active member of Temple Mount Sinai, a Reform congregation in El Paso.
"I've had to go beyond my comfort level in something I would call a reversion rather than a conversion," Mr. García said. "There were an intervening 400 years when my family had become Catholic, but something about Judaism, I don't know exactly what it was, was kept alive."
On youth and power in Liberia
Youth Power in Liberia: From Bullets to Ballots
By LYDIA POLGREEN
MONROVIA, Liberia - War took James Garmey's childhood. It came at night, in the form of armed men battering down a door and carrying him off, the 8-year-old son of a rural customs collector, to be a soldier for the warlord and future president Charles Taylor.
"I went to training," said Mr. Garmey, now 22, speaking in the smooth patois of the Liberian street, letting consonants and bits of grammar slip away. "I was small, but I learned to hold gun and after a while went to battlefront. I fire gun, I defend my area."
When Mr. Taylor fled in 2003, Mr. Garmey finally put his gun down, saying he had traded it for a different weapon altogether: the ballot.
"I cast my vote and that is my power," he said. "I no need any more gun."
Much of Africa's future belongs to young men and women like Mr. Garmey, members of a generation orphaned by conflict and AIDS, hardened by combat and want, often illiterate and unbound by deep traditions and taboos.
Manipulated by their elders, they helped unleash a cycle of bloodshed that has killed hundreds of thousands of people in West Africa alone. In that way, through their numbers and their physical strength, young people have wielded a kind of indirect and chaotic power in this region for the better part of two decades.
Now, as democracy slowly spreads, the young wield another kind of power. In Liberia people from 18 to 22 make up almost a quarter of registered voters. Add those up to the age of 28, and young people make up a huge bloc of Liberia's voting public, no less than 40 percent.
Across the region, a population explosion has created a similar youth bulge that is only now beginning to make itself manifest at the voting booth.
"They can make anybody win and can make anybody lose," said Sidi M. Diawara, an election expert in Liberia for the National Democratic Institute, a nonpartisan organization that helps develop political parties and monitor elections. "They are now the backbone of political parties, and not just in Liberia. There is a huge number of youth entering the democratic process across the region."
In Liberia, which just held its first election since the end of the 14-year civil war that killed 200,000 and displaced a third of the population, the young helped propel the presidential candidacy of George Weah, 39, a former soccer star in Europe who is idolized by many Liberians, but most of all by young men, for whom soccer is virtually a religion.
Mr. Weah came in first in the initial round of voting on Oct. 11, receiving 28 percent of the votes in a field of 22 candidates, despite having no political experience and little formal education. He will face the No. 2 finisher, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, 66, an economist with an Ivy League education and years of experience in politics, in a runoff on Nov. 8.
The race between Mr. Weah and Ms. Johnson-Sirleaf, both long assumed to be front-runners, in many ways crystallized Africa's generation gap, offering a stark choice between a well-known member of Liberia's political elite and a total outsider of the new generation.
Mr. Weah's lack of political experience and formal education is seen as an asset by many of his supporters. "He know book, he no know book, I'll vote for him," is a popular slogan, a twist on the chilling campaign cry for Mr. Taylor, who dragged the country through so much bloodshed: "He killed my ma, he killed my pa, I'll vote for him."
Mr. Weah's rise has unsettled the tiny elite, with many worrying that he will become a figure like Master Sgt. Samuel K. Doe, who seized power in a bloody coup in 1980, ending more than a century of political domination by a small, powerful clique of descendants of the American slaves who founded this country more than 100 years ago.
Like Mr. Weah, Sergeant Doe was an unschooled man with indigenous roots, but Sergeant Doe, then 28, found his mandate through force. Mr. Weah has found his at the ballot box, largely by appealing to young men like Mr. Garmey.
"I casted my vote for George Weah," Mr. Garmey said, offering his ink-stained thumb as proof. "I feel like he's a new man and he knows nothing about Liberian war."
In a society where power usually comes with age, the generational shift has intensified old flash points. Intergenerational conflict is perhaps the oldest kind of conflict in West Africa - it has formed the basis for power struggles for hundreds of years.
"To be powerful and rich in traditional societies of this region before colonization, you typically just had to wait your turn, until the people ahead of you in line died off," said Mike McGovern, an anthropologist who directs the West Africa office of the International Crisis Group, a nonpartisan organization focusing on conflict resolution. "It was not a long wait, because of low life expectancy.
"If you waited long enough, you could marry 5 or 10 women and command 2 or 3 generations of children. And in these societies, where land was pretty much unlimited, people represented wealth."
The only way for young people to jump ahead in line was through warfare, so a kind of low-level conflict has blazed on and off for generations. But in the last 20 years the power struggle between young and old has worsened as resources have become scarcer and the region's population has swelled.
"With increasing population density, wealth in people becomes problematic," Mr. McGovern said. "Land is scarce, water is scarce, resources are scarce. So people become a liability, and the level of tension rises."
Millions of idle young people, especially young men, have fed and fueled the interconnected civil wars in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast and have destabilized other nations, like Guinea, long simmering under the thumb of an ailing dictator, and Nigeria, where youth militias run rampant through the oil-rich Niger Delta.
Now that democracy is coming to more of the region, these young people are a boon and also a source of instability. They are willing to try new ways of governing and may resist the view of the state as a means of self-enrichment rather than the common good, said George Wisner, the head of the Federation of Liberian Youth, an advocacy group for young people here.
"Many of the children of Liberia haven't seen water from a pipe; they have never seen electricity from the wall," Mr. Wisner said. "There is general frustration that young people haven't been part of the decision making in this country, and this inner yearning to have a voice in national affairs. This means an openness to something new."
Yet they have been ill prepared for their new civic role.
"This is probably the only country in the world where you have a less literate youth population than the adult population," said Angela Kearny, director of Liberia's Unicef program.
Democracy will require a great deal of patience from this young, restive population. But waiting, which is what their elders have always told them they must do, is anathema to the members of this generation.
"When the objectives of an open society are achieved in Liberia, young people are invariably going to ask about the results," Mr. McGovern said. "Do we have jobs, do we have better living conditions? Is it easier to get married? The problem is you can have all the trappings of an open society and still have very little to show for it."
Patience is already in short supply. At a building called Titanic, a huge office building once meant to house the Health Ministry but never finished, dozens of former child soldiers live as squatters.
"We need job training, something to better our lives," said Ballah Henry, a lean, muscular man of 27 who joined up with Charles Taylor's militia when he was 14. His ferocity on the battlefield earned him the nickname Bad Blood. He disarmed, along with more than 100,000 other combatants, and has warily signed on to peace and democracy. He says he will wait, but not forever.
"We need to eat," Mr. Henry said. "If we don't eat, if we don't work, there's gonna be war again in this place."
On the genetic basis of dyslexia
Scientists Tie Two Additional Genes to Dyslexia
By SANDRA BLAKESLEE
One year after scientists discovered a gene whose flaw contributes to dyslexia, two more such genes have now been identified.
The findings, described yesterday in Salt Lake City at a meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics, support the idea that many people deemed simply lazy or stupid because of their severe reading problems may instead have a genetic disorder that interfered with the wiring of their brains before birth.
"I am ecstatic about this research," said Dr. Albert M. Galaburda of Harvard Medical School, a leading authority on developmental disorders who was not involved in the latest discoveries.
The findings, added to last year's, mean that for the first time, "we have a link between genes, brain development and a complex behavioral syndrome," Dr. Galaburda said.
As many as a dozen genes are probably involved in the disorder, he said, with each playing a role in the necessary migration of neurons as the brain's circuitry develops.
Researchers said a genetic test for dyslexia should be available within a year or less. Children in families that have a history of the disorder could then be tested, with a cheek swab, before they are exposed to reading instruction. If children carry a genetic risk, they could be placed in early intervention programs.
"Reading ability is a proxy for intelligence in American culture," said Dr. Sally E. Shaywitz of Yale University School of Medicine, a pediatrician who is an expert on dyslexia. The findings should help overcome stereotypes and get children the assistance they need, she said.
One of the genes newly linked to dyslexia is called DCDC2. It is active in reading centers in the human brain, said Dr. Jeffrey R. Gruen, a Yale geneticist who described the discovery at a news conference yesterday. Large deletions in a regulatory region of the gene were found in one of every five dyslexics tested, making it less active.
Fluent readers and dyslexics alike have the protein made by this gene, Dr. Gruen said, but it is less abundant in dyslexic brains. The function of the protein is not known, he said.
Rats also have the DCDC2 gene, so it should not be misconstrued as a spelling or reading gene, Dr. Gruen said. Rather, the gene supports the circuitry that underlies reading. When it was perturbed in unborn rats, he said, neurons migrated shorter distances, undercutting early brain development.
The second gene, called Robo1, was discovered by Dr. Juha Kere, a professor of molecular genetics at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. It is a developmental gene that guides connections, called axons, between the brain's two hemispheres, Dr. Kere said in an interview.
When the gene's activity is reduced, the number of finer connections, called dendrites, is reduced in brain areas involved in reading.
"You get the right signals going, but they do less well in terms of rapid processing," Dr. Kere said.
Many dyslexia experts believe that reading problems stem from an inability to process the fast sounds of spoken words.
On sexism, and tractor restoring
Battle of Sexes, With Monkey Wrenches
By JAMES DAO
LOUISVILLE, Ky., Oct. 28 - Tabetha Salsbury, the two-time reigning champion, was in trouble. The clock was running down, she had stumbled during her usually smooth delivery and now the judges were on the attack.
How had she set the worm gear? What had she used to time the engine? What kinds of seals had she installed? No detail about the tractor that a distant uncle had built 73 years ago - and that she had painstakingly rebuilt to shining perfection - seemed beyond scrutiny.
The most oil-sodden mechanic might have been flustered by the barrage. But Ms. Salsbury, 17, is the first girl to win this competition, the coveted Chevron Delo national tractor restoration title for high school students. And she is the first person of either sex to win it two years running. The room waited in hushed silence.
Cool and composed, Ms. Salsbury, a high school senior from Pueblo, Colo., answered the first question, struggled with the second, and gave up on the third. "She blew it," her father, Hez Salsbury, muttered with obvious dismay.
Three-peats do not come easily in any sport. But if Ms. Salsbury is no longer the national champion in restoring tractors - 18-year-old Tyler Raska of Wallis, Tex., walked off with the $2,500 first-place prize on Friday - she has been a path breaker in a once male-dominated sport that is gaining popularity in rural high schools and helping turn old tractors into big business.
"I think my biggest accomplishment was to give a spark to other girls around the country," said Ms. Salsbury, upbeat even in defeat and sounding like a grizzled veteran despite her young age. "Women are getting their foot in the door."
Ms. Salsbury needed only to watch the team competition to see some of the fruit of her work. Among the 10 finalists was an all-girls team from Decatur, Tex., the first in the 10-year history of the competition to win a medal.
The Decatur girls, who finished second in the team competition, seem an unlikely bunch for the grease-monkey world of tractor restoration. One of the team's six members is a cheerleader, two were homecoming queen finalists and another was a beauty queen. Only one had ever tinkered with cars. The others claimed not to know the working end of a wrench.
But over the course of the last year, they learned the inner anatomy of combustion engines, restored from trailer hitch to hood grille a 1950 Ferguson tractor and beat the local high school's boys team in two out of three local competitions.
Through it all, they endured the taunts of guys, and occasionally girls, in their town of 5,000 people in the football-crazy plains of North Texas, about 60 miles outside Dallas.
"The guys all felt like it was a joke," said Jordan Cade, a 17-year-old senior. "But once we started beating them, they started to respect us."
Having a sense of humor helped. The girls printed brown T-shirts with pink lettering that said on the front, "My boyfriend said I had to choose between him and the tractor," and on the back, "I'm sure going to miss him."
On Friday, however, the girls were in tears when they learned that they had finished only second. "It's bittersweet," said Rick Elmore, their coach and the father of a team member. "No one remembers who lost the World Series."
"Sport" might seem the wrong word to describe an endeavor that entails tapping pistons, turning wrenches and spraying paint - until one sees the intensity of the competition. Serious contestants invest thousands of dollars in their machines and work with extraordinary discipline, spending hours a day on projects for months and even years, sometimes devoting entire summer vacations to finishing tractors for fall events.
Tyler Raska, this year's individual winner, began restoring tractors when he was 12 at the urging of his father, a farmer, who had hoped he would become a better reader by poring over equipment manuals.
He is still a weak reader, his father said. But Tyler has become a master restorer, spending hours a day on his tractors. His latest, a 1959 John Deere 630, has won seven titles, including the national Chevron Delo crown, earning him about $20,000 in cash, prizes and scholarship money. He sold an earlier project to a California farmer for $10,000.
"That guy bought it to work on his farm, but said it was too pretty to use," Tim Raska, Tyler's father, said proudly. Tyler plans to start his own tractor-restoring business after attending technical college.
Hez Salsbury says he is getting into the business, too. A part-time welding teacher at a community college, Mr. Salsbury, 46, believes there is a booming market in restored tractors driven by people who grew up on farms, moved to the suburbs and now want to acquire things that remind them of their childhood.
"They put the tractors in their garages, take them to shows and it brings back fond memories," Mr. Salsbury said.
The competition is sponsored by Chevron but held at the national convention of the F.F.A., the group once known as the Future Farmers of America. Contestants do not bring their tractors, but instead describe their projects in thick, neatly bound books filled with color photographs. They also give 20-minute oral presentations before a panel of five judges, using PowerPoint slides, laser pointers and, in some cases, music to embroider dry recitations about overhauling fuel systems.
Ms. Salsbury tried to spice up her presentation by giving each judge a set of wood dowels, buttons and spindles that they were to assemble into tiny toy tractors. But the gift apparently did little to improve her score.
On Thursday, she expressed dismay about her performance. But by Friday, she was philosophical, thinking ahead to college, expressing pride in the heirloom tractor she had restored and musing on her grandfather's efforts to tweak her competitive spirit.
"He always said, 'It's O.K. for girls to restore tractors, but guys can do it better,' " she said. "He knew that would aggravate me and make me work harder."
On memories of Rosa Parks
Two Sets of Parks Memories, From Before the Boycott and After
By MONICA DAVEY
DEARBORN, Mich., Oct. 25 - Quietly, somberly, people stepped up the stairs of an old bus here on Tuesday and tried to peer back into the life of Rosa Parks, a woman whose seemingly simple trip on the bus five decades ago had, they said, changed their own.
"She showed me that maybe you can change the world, maybe I can change the world," said Tyrone Ashe, one in a stream of visitors to the Henry Ford Museum, where officials say they have on display the very city bus, No. 2857 from Montgomery, Ala., in which Mrs. Parks once refused to give up her seat.
Mr. Ashe, who, at 48, was not born when Mrs. Parks's quiet defiance touched off the civil rights movement, said he nonetheless felt personally wounded when he heard of her death on Monday night and was drawn here to stand on the bus, sit in the seat, imagine that moment.
"She will live on," Mr. Ashe said. "If it wasn't for her, I would still be riding on the back of that bus."
As memorials were planned in her honor in several cities, people around the country reflected on Mrs. Parks's legacy, the oldest among them recalling their own days of entering separate doors and bathrooms and restaurants, the youngest speaking more fuzzily of a woman whose name they had read in their history texts.
President Bush described her as "one of the most inspiring women" of the 20th century, one who would always carry a "special place in American history."
Representative John Conyers Jr., the Michigan Democrat whose office employed Mrs. Parks for two decades, called the modest and unassuming woman who once worked as a seamstress a giant.
"There are very few people who can say their actions and conduct changed the face of the nation, and Rosa Parks is one of those individuals," Mr. Conyers said.
The Rev. Al Sharpton called for flags to be flown at half-staff.
"More than any single American," Mr. Sharpton said, "she changed American life, having never held public office, having no political ambition, just her quiet dignity and courage."
In the places where Mrs. Parks lived or was known best - Detroit, Montgomery and Atlanta - people carried more personal memories.
She was the sweet lady who, until she was in poor health, had always appeared for church at the St. Matthew A.M.E. Church in Detroit and who sewed clothes for church leaders, the Rev. Gloria J. Clark said.
She was the woman whose images filled a staircase at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference Women's Center in Atlanta. That is where Mrs. Parks is shown being fingerprinted at a police station. There is her mug shot, her eyes staring ahead behind owlish glasses.
"She was a sister, a mother, a 'shero,' as we call them now," said Evelyn G. Lowery, the founder of the S.C.L.C./Women and a friend of Mrs. Parks.
With her death, some people said they wondered - and worried - that her life and her role might be forgotten by younger generations. Along with it, they said, might fade the memories of the civil rights struggle and all that it meant.
Marty Smith, who answers questions for visitors to the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, the home church of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and a spiritual hub of the civil rights movement, put out a sign with pictures of Mrs. Parks and her birth and death dates.
"I wanted people to know that she'd passed," Mr. Smith said.
His mother, he added, had made certain that he long understood just who Mrs. Parks was and what she had done.
"In today's time, you can't find people who will stand up and do the right thing for the causes they stood up for," he said.
For Mrs. Parks's refusal to leave her seat on the bus, she was convicted of violating segregation laws, setting off a bus boycott by blacks in Montgomery that ran for more than a year.
In Detroit and Atlanta on Tuesday, some young people who were interviewed said they knew Mrs. Parks's name but were uncertain of precisely what she had done or when she had lived. Others - black and white - said they were fairly certain and said they had no intention of forgetting the lessons of her life.
"I know a little a bit about what she did," said Nathan Cohen, 22, a black college student from Pontiac. "By not giving up her bus seat, it was a moment in history that helped a lot of black people in the South."
Still, some leaders said they had no intention of letting Mrs. Parks's death end her story. Representative Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, Democrat of Michigan, said she mourned with the Parks family until 1 a.m. in the apartment in downtown Detroit where Mrs. Parks died.
"In addition to crying and praying and talking about Mrs. Parks," Ms. Kilpatrick said, "we all committed ourselves to carrying on her word."
In a telephone interview from South Africa, the Rev. Jesse Jackson said, "Her legacy is part of American history and folklore, and it will never die."
Back here, Bill Pretzer, a curator of political history at the Ford museum, told the history of the bus on display, which, like Mrs. Parks, once risked being forgotten. Though there has been debate about whether this 1948 bus that sat rusting in an Alabama field until 2001 is really the bus of the protest, Mr. Pretzer said the museum had documents that made him certain of that.
The bus was sold to the museum for $492,000 and restored to look as it did in 1955, down to the advertisements for Wrigley Spearmint gum inside, for an additional $300,000.
When student groups tour the bus and hear Mrs. Parks's history, there is often a sense among them, Mr. Pretzer said, that what occurred could not have.
"They say, 'What do you mean can't sit there? That's impossible,' " he said. "Which is why we need to keep looking at this. There is a danger that if we don't spark peoples' imaginations as to what in fact happened, we risk it one day happening again."
In chilly weather, Ruth Matthews came from Detroit to gaze at the bus, now draped in black and purple bunting in Mrs. Parks's honor. Mrs. Matthews, 75, said she remembered all too well the days when she could not sit at certain tables or on seats on certain buses. Then along came Mrs. Parks.
"For once, somebody had the courage to stand up for the truth," Mrs. Matthews said.
She brought her daughter Revia Gardner, 48. She wanted them both to see it.
And an Onion article on fire trucks...
Look, out the window! A fire truck! I've seen drawings of fire trucks in my picture books, of course, but how could I have ever known how pale and insignificant those crude representations were in comparison to the real thing! Fire truck! Oh, great God in heaven, fire truck! This has got to be the most moving of mankind's creations, and perhaps of nature's, as well.
This whirlwind of sensory input is almost more than my tiny mind can process! Mere words cannot begin to convey what I am feeling! This incredible, life-changing, soul-shattering wonder is... Why, it is beyond description!
Run! Run to the window as fast as your giant legs can carry you! Whatever you are doing right now, place it aside for a moment—it can't possibly be as important as the opportunity to see a fire truck with your own eyes.
This is quite possibly the greatest experience of my life thus far.
How do I even begin to describe its magnificence? First off, it is big—bigger than anything I could ever imagine! Secondly, it's painted an incredible, alarming, eye-catching red! Thirdly, it makes the most attention-grabbing sounds: whistles, bangs, gearshifts, bells. And that siren! Of all the noises, the siren is surely the best! I wonder if, somehow—but no, surely not—unless... Well, could I? Could I possibly? EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE... No, that's not right: It's high-pitched enough, but missing some crucial... OOOOOOOOOO... No, again, it's got the booming quality, but lacks the screechingly irritating aspect of the higher register. Wait! What if I combine the two, in an alternating series of high- and low-frequency modulations, and belt it out at the top of my lungs? EEEEEEEEEEEEEEE-OOOOOOOOO,EEEEEEEEEEEEE-OOOOOOOOO! That's it! That's the same noise that the fire truck is making! EEEEEEEEEEEEE-OOOOOOOOOOOO, EEEEEEEEEEEEEE-OOOOOOOO! EEEEEEEEEEEE-OOOOOOOOOOOOO, EEEEEEEEE-OOOOOOOO! Oh, God. I could make this noise all day! I never want to do anything else!
And now—am I really seeing this? It can't be! Surely there are not colorfully dressed men with powerful bodies, brave expressions, and purposeful toolbelts hanging off the side of the fire truck as it careens around the corner! If this is a dream, let me never wake. Look at their hats! They have the most wonderful hats ever made! I must acquire a child-sized version of such a hat! They are the most large and most yellow hats I have ever seen.
That's it: My fate in this life is sealed. I must become one of these men. Nothing will ever sway me from this goal.
But what a spectacle it is! You must come and look upon this immediately! This fire truck is blowing my mind. It is as if God Himself has created this piece of machinery just for me! But it will not be here long. It is driving away. It grows quieter and quieter as it recedes from my visual field and...
It is gone. It was only here for one fleeting moment, and you never even saw it. This is the greatest tragedy that has ever occurred. My faith in the universe is shaken to its core by the magnitude of what you have missed. If only you had listened to me. You may never be able to comprehend my experience, for I have seen the fire truck, and I will never think about anything else again as long as I live.
Huh? What is... Why... Afgh! Airplane! Airplane! Mommy! Airplane! Don't bother with those towels! Don't you see? Look! There is an actual airplane in the sky!
Hispanics Uncovering Roots as Inquisition's 'Hidden' Jews
By SIMON ROMERO
HOUSTON, Oct. 28 - When she was growing up in a small town in southern Colorado, an area where her ancestors settled centuries ago when it was on the fringes of the northern frontier of New Spain, Bernadette Gonzalez always thought some of the stories about her family were unusual, if not bizarre.
Her grandmother, for instance, refused to travel on Saturday and would use a specific porcelain basin to drain blood out of meat before she cooked it. In one tale that particularly puzzled Ms. Gonzalez, 52, her grandfather called for a Jewish doctor to circumcise him while he was on his death bed in a hospital in Trinidad, Colo.
Only after Ms. Gonzalez moved to Houston to work as a lawyer and began discussing these tales with a Jewish colleague, she said, did "the pieces of the puzzle" start falling into place.
Ms. Gonzalez started researching her family history and concluded that her ancestors were Marranos, or Sephardic Jews, who had fled the Inquisition in Spain and in Mexico more than four centuries ago. Though raised in the Roman Catholic faith, Ms. Gonzalez felt a need to reconnect to her Jewish roots, so she converted to Judaism three years ago.
"I feel like I came home," said Ms. Gonzalez, who now often uses the first name Batya. "The fingerprints of my past were all around me, but I didn't know what they meant."
It is difficult to know precisely how many Hispanics are converting or adopting Jewish religious practices, but accounts of such embraces of Judaism are growing more common in parts of the Southwest. In Clear Lake, a suburb south of Houston, Rabbi Stuart Federow has overseen half a dozen conversions of Hispanics in recent years. In El Paso, Rabbi Stephen Leon said he had converted almost 40 Hispanic families since moving to Texas from New Jersey 19 years ago.
These conversions are the latest chapter in the story of the crypto-Jews, or hidden Jews, of the southwestern United States and northern Mexico, who are thought to be descended from the Sephardic Jews who began fleeing Spain more than 500 years ago. The story is being bolstered by recent historical research and advances in DNA testing that are said to reveal a prominent role played by crypto-Jews and their descendants in Spain's colonization of the Southwest.
For more than two decades, anecdotal evidence collected by researchers in New Mexico, Colorado and Texas suggested that some nominally Catholic families of Iberian descent had stealthily maintained Jewish customs throughout the centuries, including lighting candles on Friday evening, avoiding pork and having the Star of David inscribed on gravestones.
The whispers of hidden rituals coming from thoroughly Catholic communities were at times met with skepticism. One explanation for these seemingly Jewish customs was that evangelical Protestant sects active in the Southwest about a century ago had used Jewish imagery and Hebrew writing in their proselytizing, and that these symbols had become ingrained in isolated Hispanic communities.
Skepticism aside, some rabbis view assistance to or conversions of crypto-Jews as a responsibility. "The American Jewish community provided support in bringing Soviet, Albanian or Syrian Jews to the United States, and helping them in their transition," said Rabbi Leon of Congregation B'nai Zion, a Conservative congregation in El Paso. "I don't see how the crypto-Jews are any different."
Modern science may now be shedding new light on the history of the crypto-Jews after molecular anthropologists recently developed a DNA test of the male or Y chromosome that can indicate an ancestral connection to the Cohanim, a priestly class of Jews that traces its origin back more than 3,000 years to Aaron, the older brother of Moses.
Family Tree DNA, a Houston company that offers a Cohanim test to its male clients, gets about one inquiry a day from Hispanics interested in exploring the possibility of Jewish ancestry, said Bennett Greenspan, its founder and chief executive. Mr. Greenspan said about one in 10 of the Hispanic men tested by his company showed Semitic ancestry strongly suggesting a Jewish background. (Another divergent possibility is that the test might suggest North African Muslim ancestry.)
"The results have just blown me over, reminding me of something out of Kaifeng," Mr. Greenspan said, referring to the Chinese city of Kaifeng, where a small Jewish community persisted for about 1,000 years until the mid-19th century when it was almost completely assimilated. "Lots of Hispanic people tell me they're interested in something Jewish and they can't explain it. Well, this helps explain it."
Not everyone who discovers Jewish ancestry, either through genealogical research or DNA testing, has decided to convert to Judaism, but some Hispanics who have found links still feel drawn to incorporate Jewish customs into their life. For instance, the Rev. William Sanchez, 52, a Catholic priest in Albuquerque, spent years researching his family's past in New Mexico before a DNA test three years ago showed that he almost certainly had the Jewish Cohanim marker.
Since then, Father Sanchez has sought to educate his parishioners on the connections between Catholicism and Judaism, and has helped oversee the Nuevo Mexico Project, which tries to identify Sephardic ancestry among Hispanics from New Mexico. He has encouraged more than 100 of his parishioners to take DNA tests.
Father Sanchez has also introduced some Jewish customs at St. Edwins Church in Albuquerque, where he serves; he blew the shofar, or ram's horn, this month during the Yom Kippur holiday. At another parish where he used to work in rural northeastern New Mexico, in the village of Villanueva, he would hold an annual Passover supper.
"I have a pluralistic, not an antagonistic, view of our religions," Father Sanchez said.
Still, others feel they have to make a clean break upon exploring their Jewish roots. John García, a lawyer in El Paso whose family moved to the United States two generations ago from northern Mexico, said he had heard stories since he was a boy that his family had a Sephardic Jewish past.
He formally converted to Judaism in 2001 and last year had a bar mitzvah in El Paso, at the age of 53, together with five other crypto-Jews. These days Mr. García, a lawyer in the public defender's office in El Paso, never works on the Sabbath and is an active member of Temple Mount Sinai, a Reform congregation in El Paso.
"I've had to go beyond my comfort level in something I would call a reversion rather than a conversion," Mr. García said. "There were an intervening 400 years when my family had become Catholic, but something about Judaism, I don't know exactly what it was, was kept alive."
On youth and power in Liberia
Youth Power in Liberia: From Bullets to Ballots
By LYDIA POLGREEN
MONROVIA, Liberia - War took James Garmey's childhood. It came at night, in the form of armed men battering down a door and carrying him off, the 8-year-old son of a rural customs collector, to be a soldier for the warlord and future president Charles Taylor.
"I went to training," said Mr. Garmey, now 22, speaking in the smooth patois of the Liberian street, letting consonants and bits of grammar slip away. "I was small, but I learned to hold gun and after a while went to battlefront. I fire gun, I defend my area."
When Mr. Taylor fled in 2003, Mr. Garmey finally put his gun down, saying he had traded it for a different weapon altogether: the ballot.
"I cast my vote and that is my power," he said. "I no need any more gun."
Much of Africa's future belongs to young men and women like Mr. Garmey, members of a generation orphaned by conflict and AIDS, hardened by combat and want, often illiterate and unbound by deep traditions and taboos.
Manipulated by their elders, they helped unleash a cycle of bloodshed that has killed hundreds of thousands of people in West Africa alone. In that way, through their numbers and their physical strength, young people have wielded a kind of indirect and chaotic power in this region for the better part of two decades.
Now, as democracy slowly spreads, the young wield another kind of power. In Liberia people from 18 to 22 make up almost a quarter of registered voters. Add those up to the age of 28, and young people make up a huge bloc of Liberia's voting public, no less than 40 percent.
Across the region, a population explosion has created a similar youth bulge that is only now beginning to make itself manifest at the voting booth.
"They can make anybody win and can make anybody lose," said Sidi M. Diawara, an election expert in Liberia for the National Democratic Institute, a nonpartisan organization that helps develop political parties and monitor elections. "They are now the backbone of political parties, and not just in Liberia. There is a huge number of youth entering the democratic process across the region."
In Liberia, which just held its first election since the end of the 14-year civil war that killed 200,000 and displaced a third of the population, the young helped propel the presidential candidacy of George Weah, 39, a former soccer star in Europe who is idolized by many Liberians, but most of all by young men, for whom soccer is virtually a religion.
Mr. Weah came in first in the initial round of voting on Oct. 11, receiving 28 percent of the votes in a field of 22 candidates, despite having no political experience and little formal education. He will face the No. 2 finisher, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, 66, an economist with an Ivy League education and years of experience in politics, in a runoff on Nov. 8.
The race between Mr. Weah and Ms. Johnson-Sirleaf, both long assumed to be front-runners, in many ways crystallized Africa's generation gap, offering a stark choice between a well-known member of Liberia's political elite and a total outsider of the new generation.
Mr. Weah's lack of political experience and formal education is seen as an asset by many of his supporters. "He know book, he no know book, I'll vote for him," is a popular slogan, a twist on the chilling campaign cry for Mr. Taylor, who dragged the country through so much bloodshed: "He killed my ma, he killed my pa, I'll vote for him."
Mr. Weah's rise has unsettled the tiny elite, with many worrying that he will become a figure like Master Sgt. Samuel K. Doe, who seized power in a bloody coup in 1980, ending more than a century of political domination by a small, powerful clique of descendants of the American slaves who founded this country more than 100 years ago.
Like Mr. Weah, Sergeant Doe was an unschooled man with indigenous roots, but Sergeant Doe, then 28, found his mandate through force. Mr. Weah has found his at the ballot box, largely by appealing to young men like Mr. Garmey.
"I casted my vote for George Weah," Mr. Garmey said, offering his ink-stained thumb as proof. "I feel like he's a new man and he knows nothing about Liberian war."
In a society where power usually comes with age, the generational shift has intensified old flash points. Intergenerational conflict is perhaps the oldest kind of conflict in West Africa - it has formed the basis for power struggles for hundreds of years.
"To be powerful and rich in traditional societies of this region before colonization, you typically just had to wait your turn, until the people ahead of you in line died off," said Mike McGovern, an anthropologist who directs the West Africa office of the International Crisis Group, a nonpartisan organization focusing on conflict resolution. "It was not a long wait, because of low life expectancy.
"If you waited long enough, you could marry 5 or 10 women and command 2 or 3 generations of children. And in these societies, where land was pretty much unlimited, people represented wealth."
The only way for young people to jump ahead in line was through warfare, so a kind of low-level conflict has blazed on and off for generations. But in the last 20 years the power struggle between young and old has worsened as resources have become scarcer and the region's population has swelled.
"With increasing population density, wealth in people becomes problematic," Mr. McGovern said. "Land is scarce, water is scarce, resources are scarce. So people become a liability, and the level of tension rises."
Millions of idle young people, especially young men, have fed and fueled the interconnected civil wars in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast and have destabilized other nations, like Guinea, long simmering under the thumb of an ailing dictator, and Nigeria, where youth militias run rampant through the oil-rich Niger Delta.
Now that democracy is coming to more of the region, these young people are a boon and also a source of instability. They are willing to try new ways of governing and may resist the view of the state as a means of self-enrichment rather than the common good, said George Wisner, the head of the Federation of Liberian Youth, an advocacy group for young people here.
"Many of the children of Liberia haven't seen water from a pipe; they have never seen electricity from the wall," Mr. Wisner said. "There is general frustration that young people haven't been part of the decision making in this country, and this inner yearning to have a voice in national affairs. This means an openness to something new."
Yet they have been ill prepared for their new civic role.
"This is probably the only country in the world where you have a less literate youth population than the adult population," said Angela Kearny, director of Liberia's Unicef program.
Democracy will require a great deal of patience from this young, restive population. But waiting, which is what their elders have always told them they must do, is anathema to the members of this generation.
"When the objectives of an open society are achieved in Liberia, young people are invariably going to ask about the results," Mr. McGovern said. "Do we have jobs, do we have better living conditions? Is it easier to get married? The problem is you can have all the trappings of an open society and still have very little to show for it."
Patience is already in short supply. At a building called Titanic, a huge office building once meant to house the Health Ministry but never finished, dozens of former child soldiers live as squatters.
"We need job training, something to better our lives," said Ballah Henry, a lean, muscular man of 27 who joined up with Charles Taylor's militia when he was 14. His ferocity on the battlefield earned him the nickname Bad Blood. He disarmed, along with more than 100,000 other combatants, and has warily signed on to peace and democracy. He says he will wait, but not forever.
"We need to eat," Mr. Henry said. "If we don't eat, if we don't work, there's gonna be war again in this place."
On the genetic basis of dyslexia
Scientists Tie Two Additional Genes to Dyslexia
By SANDRA BLAKESLEE
One year after scientists discovered a gene whose flaw contributes to dyslexia, two more such genes have now been identified.
The findings, described yesterday in Salt Lake City at a meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics, support the idea that many people deemed simply lazy or stupid because of their severe reading problems may instead have a genetic disorder that interfered with the wiring of their brains before birth.
"I am ecstatic about this research," said Dr. Albert M. Galaburda of Harvard Medical School, a leading authority on developmental disorders who was not involved in the latest discoveries.
The findings, added to last year's, mean that for the first time, "we have a link between genes, brain development and a complex behavioral syndrome," Dr. Galaburda said.
As many as a dozen genes are probably involved in the disorder, he said, with each playing a role in the necessary migration of neurons as the brain's circuitry develops.
Researchers said a genetic test for dyslexia should be available within a year or less. Children in families that have a history of the disorder could then be tested, with a cheek swab, before they are exposed to reading instruction. If children carry a genetic risk, they could be placed in early intervention programs.
"Reading ability is a proxy for intelligence in American culture," said Dr. Sally E. Shaywitz of Yale University School of Medicine, a pediatrician who is an expert on dyslexia. The findings should help overcome stereotypes and get children the assistance they need, she said.
One of the genes newly linked to dyslexia is called DCDC2. It is active in reading centers in the human brain, said Dr. Jeffrey R. Gruen, a Yale geneticist who described the discovery at a news conference yesterday. Large deletions in a regulatory region of the gene were found in one of every five dyslexics tested, making it less active.
Fluent readers and dyslexics alike have the protein made by this gene, Dr. Gruen said, but it is less abundant in dyslexic brains. The function of the protein is not known, he said.
Rats also have the DCDC2 gene, so it should not be misconstrued as a spelling or reading gene, Dr. Gruen said. Rather, the gene supports the circuitry that underlies reading. When it was perturbed in unborn rats, he said, neurons migrated shorter distances, undercutting early brain development.
The second gene, called Robo1, was discovered by Dr. Juha Kere, a professor of molecular genetics at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. It is a developmental gene that guides connections, called axons, between the brain's two hemispheres, Dr. Kere said in an interview.
When the gene's activity is reduced, the number of finer connections, called dendrites, is reduced in brain areas involved in reading.
"You get the right signals going, but they do less well in terms of rapid processing," Dr. Kere said.
Many dyslexia experts believe that reading problems stem from an inability to process the fast sounds of spoken words.
On sexism, and tractor restoring
Battle of Sexes, With Monkey Wrenches
By JAMES DAO
LOUISVILLE, Ky., Oct. 28 - Tabetha Salsbury, the two-time reigning champion, was in trouble. The clock was running down, she had stumbled during her usually smooth delivery and now the judges were on the attack.
How had she set the worm gear? What had she used to time the engine? What kinds of seals had she installed? No detail about the tractor that a distant uncle had built 73 years ago - and that she had painstakingly rebuilt to shining perfection - seemed beyond scrutiny.
The most oil-sodden mechanic might have been flustered by the barrage. But Ms. Salsbury, 17, is the first girl to win this competition, the coveted Chevron Delo national tractor restoration title for high school students. And she is the first person of either sex to win it two years running. The room waited in hushed silence.
Cool and composed, Ms. Salsbury, a high school senior from Pueblo, Colo., answered the first question, struggled with the second, and gave up on the third. "She blew it," her father, Hez Salsbury, muttered with obvious dismay.
Three-peats do not come easily in any sport. But if Ms. Salsbury is no longer the national champion in restoring tractors - 18-year-old Tyler Raska of Wallis, Tex., walked off with the $2,500 first-place prize on Friday - she has been a path breaker in a once male-dominated sport that is gaining popularity in rural high schools and helping turn old tractors into big business.
"I think my biggest accomplishment was to give a spark to other girls around the country," said Ms. Salsbury, upbeat even in defeat and sounding like a grizzled veteran despite her young age. "Women are getting their foot in the door."
Ms. Salsbury needed only to watch the team competition to see some of the fruit of her work. Among the 10 finalists was an all-girls team from Decatur, Tex., the first in the 10-year history of the competition to win a medal.
The Decatur girls, who finished second in the team competition, seem an unlikely bunch for the grease-monkey world of tractor restoration. One of the team's six members is a cheerleader, two were homecoming queen finalists and another was a beauty queen. Only one had ever tinkered with cars. The others claimed not to know the working end of a wrench.
But over the course of the last year, they learned the inner anatomy of combustion engines, restored from trailer hitch to hood grille a 1950 Ferguson tractor and beat the local high school's boys team in two out of three local competitions.
Through it all, they endured the taunts of guys, and occasionally girls, in their town of 5,000 people in the football-crazy plains of North Texas, about 60 miles outside Dallas.
"The guys all felt like it was a joke," said Jordan Cade, a 17-year-old senior. "But once we started beating them, they started to respect us."
Having a sense of humor helped. The girls printed brown T-shirts with pink lettering that said on the front, "My boyfriend said I had to choose between him and the tractor," and on the back, "I'm sure going to miss him."
On Friday, however, the girls were in tears when they learned that they had finished only second. "It's bittersweet," said Rick Elmore, their coach and the father of a team member. "No one remembers who lost the World Series."
"Sport" might seem the wrong word to describe an endeavor that entails tapping pistons, turning wrenches and spraying paint - until one sees the intensity of the competition. Serious contestants invest thousands of dollars in their machines and work with extraordinary discipline, spending hours a day on projects for months and even years, sometimes devoting entire summer vacations to finishing tractors for fall events.
Tyler Raska, this year's individual winner, began restoring tractors when he was 12 at the urging of his father, a farmer, who had hoped he would become a better reader by poring over equipment manuals.
He is still a weak reader, his father said. But Tyler has become a master restorer, spending hours a day on his tractors. His latest, a 1959 John Deere 630, has won seven titles, including the national Chevron Delo crown, earning him about $20,000 in cash, prizes and scholarship money. He sold an earlier project to a California farmer for $10,000.
"That guy bought it to work on his farm, but said it was too pretty to use," Tim Raska, Tyler's father, said proudly. Tyler plans to start his own tractor-restoring business after attending technical college.
Hez Salsbury says he is getting into the business, too. A part-time welding teacher at a community college, Mr. Salsbury, 46, believes there is a booming market in restored tractors driven by people who grew up on farms, moved to the suburbs and now want to acquire things that remind them of their childhood.
"They put the tractors in their garages, take them to shows and it brings back fond memories," Mr. Salsbury said.
The competition is sponsored by Chevron but held at the national convention of the F.F.A., the group once known as the Future Farmers of America. Contestants do not bring their tractors, but instead describe their projects in thick, neatly bound books filled with color photographs. They also give 20-minute oral presentations before a panel of five judges, using PowerPoint slides, laser pointers and, in some cases, music to embroider dry recitations about overhauling fuel systems.
Ms. Salsbury tried to spice up her presentation by giving each judge a set of wood dowels, buttons and spindles that they were to assemble into tiny toy tractors. But the gift apparently did little to improve her score.
On Thursday, she expressed dismay about her performance. But by Friday, she was philosophical, thinking ahead to college, expressing pride in the heirloom tractor she had restored and musing on her grandfather's efforts to tweak her competitive spirit.
"He always said, 'It's O.K. for girls to restore tractors, but guys can do it better,' " she said. "He knew that would aggravate me and make me work harder."
On memories of Rosa Parks
Two Sets of Parks Memories, From Before the Boycott and After
By MONICA DAVEY
DEARBORN, Mich., Oct. 25 - Quietly, somberly, people stepped up the stairs of an old bus here on Tuesday and tried to peer back into the life of Rosa Parks, a woman whose seemingly simple trip on the bus five decades ago had, they said, changed their own.
"She showed me that maybe you can change the world, maybe I can change the world," said Tyrone Ashe, one in a stream of visitors to the Henry Ford Museum, where officials say they have on display the very city bus, No. 2857 from Montgomery, Ala., in which Mrs. Parks once refused to give up her seat.
Mr. Ashe, who, at 48, was not born when Mrs. Parks's quiet defiance touched off the civil rights movement, said he nonetheless felt personally wounded when he heard of her death on Monday night and was drawn here to stand on the bus, sit in the seat, imagine that moment.
"She will live on," Mr. Ashe said. "If it wasn't for her, I would still be riding on the back of that bus."
As memorials were planned in her honor in several cities, people around the country reflected on Mrs. Parks's legacy, the oldest among them recalling their own days of entering separate doors and bathrooms and restaurants, the youngest speaking more fuzzily of a woman whose name they had read in their history texts.
President Bush described her as "one of the most inspiring women" of the 20th century, one who would always carry a "special place in American history."
Representative John Conyers Jr., the Michigan Democrat whose office employed Mrs. Parks for two decades, called the modest and unassuming woman who once worked as a seamstress a giant.
"There are very few people who can say their actions and conduct changed the face of the nation, and Rosa Parks is one of those individuals," Mr. Conyers said.
The Rev. Al Sharpton called for flags to be flown at half-staff.
"More than any single American," Mr. Sharpton said, "she changed American life, having never held public office, having no political ambition, just her quiet dignity and courage."
In the places where Mrs. Parks lived or was known best - Detroit, Montgomery and Atlanta - people carried more personal memories.
She was the sweet lady who, until she was in poor health, had always appeared for church at the St. Matthew A.M.E. Church in Detroit and who sewed clothes for church leaders, the Rev. Gloria J. Clark said.
She was the woman whose images filled a staircase at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference Women's Center in Atlanta. That is where Mrs. Parks is shown being fingerprinted at a police station. There is her mug shot, her eyes staring ahead behind owlish glasses.
"She was a sister, a mother, a 'shero,' as we call them now," said Evelyn G. Lowery, the founder of the S.C.L.C./Women and a friend of Mrs. Parks.
With her death, some people said they wondered - and worried - that her life and her role might be forgotten by younger generations. Along with it, they said, might fade the memories of the civil rights struggle and all that it meant.
Marty Smith, who answers questions for visitors to the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, the home church of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and a spiritual hub of the civil rights movement, put out a sign with pictures of Mrs. Parks and her birth and death dates.
"I wanted people to know that she'd passed," Mr. Smith said.
His mother, he added, had made certain that he long understood just who Mrs. Parks was and what she had done.
"In today's time, you can't find people who will stand up and do the right thing for the causes they stood up for," he said.
For Mrs. Parks's refusal to leave her seat on the bus, she was convicted of violating segregation laws, setting off a bus boycott by blacks in Montgomery that ran for more than a year.
In Detroit and Atlanta on Tuesday, some young people who were interviewed said they knew Mrs. Parks's name but were uncertain of precisely what she had done or when she had lived. Others - black and white - said they were fairly certain and said they had no intention of forgetting the lessons of her life.
"I know a little a bit about what she did," said Nathan Cohen, 22, a black college student from Pontiac. "By not giving up her bus seat, it was a moment in history that helped a lot of black people in the South."
Still, some leaders said they had no intention of letting Mrs. Parks's death end her story. Representative Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, Democrat of Michigan, said she mourned with the Parks family until 1 a.m. in the apartment in downtown Detroit where Mrs. Parks died.
"In addition to crying and praying and talking about Mrs. Parks," Ms. Kilpatrick said, "we all committed ourselves to carrying on her word."
In a telephone interview from South Africa, the Rev. Jesse Jackson said, "Her legacy is part of American history and folklore, and it will never die."
Back here, Bill Pretzer, a curator of political history at the Ford museum, told the history of the bus on display, which, like Mrs. Parks, once risked being forgotten. Though there has been debate about whether this 1948 bus that sat rusting in an Alabama field until 2001 is really the bus of the protest, Mr. Pretzer said the museum had documents that made him certain of that.
The bus was sold to the museum for $492,000 and restored to look as it did in 1955, down to the advertisements for Wrigley Spearmint gum inside, for an additional $300,000.
When student groups tour the bus and hear Mrs. Parks's history, there is often a sense among them, Mr. Pretzer said, that what occurred could not have.
"They say, 'What do you mean can't sit there? That's impossible,' " he said. "Which is why we need to keep looking at this. There is a danger that if we don't spark peoples' imaginations as to what in fact happened, we risk it one day happening again."
In chilly weather, Ruth Matthews came from Detroit to gaze at the bus, now draped in black and purple bunting in Mrs. Parks's honor. Mrs. Matthews, 75, said she remembered all too well the days when she could not sit at certain tables or on seats on certain buses. Then along came Mrs. Parks.
"For once, somebody had the courage to stand up for the truth," Mrs. Matthews said.
She brought her daughter Revia Gardner, 48. She wanted them both to see it.
And an Onion article on fire trucks...
Look, out the window! A fire truck! I've seen drawings of fire trucks in my picture books, of course, but how could I have ever known how pale and insignificant those crude representations were in comparison to the real thing! Fire truck! Oh, great God in heaven, fire truck! This has got to be the most moving of mankind's creations, and perhaps of nature's, as well.
This whirlwind of sensory input is almost more than my tiny mind can process! Mere words cannot begin to convey what I am feeling! This incredible, life-changing, soul-shattering wonder is... Why, it is beyond description!
Run! Run to the window as fast as your giant legs can carry you! Whatever you are doing right now, place it aside for a moment—it can't possibly be as important as the opportunity to see a fire truck with your own eyes.
This is quite possibly the greatest experience of my life thus far.
How do I even begin to describe its magnificence? First off, it is big—bigger than anything I could ever imagine! Secondly, it's painted an incredible, alarming, eye-catching red! Thirdly, it makes the most attention-grabbing sounds: whistles, bangs, gearshifts, bells. And that siren! Of all the noises, the siren is surely the best! I wonder if, somehow—but no, surely not—unless... Well, could I? Could I possibly? EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE... No, that's not right: It's high-pitched enough, but missing some crucial... OOOOOOOOOO... No, again, it's got the booming quality, but lacks the screechingly irritating aspect of the higher register. Wait! What if I combine the two, in an alternating series of high- and low-frequency modulations, and belt it out at the top of my lungs? EEEEEEEEEEEEEEE-OOOOOOOOO,EEEEEEEEEEEEE-OOOOOOOOO! That's it! That's the same noise that the fire truck is making! EEEEEEEEEEEEE-OOOOOOOOOOOO, EEEEEEEEEEEEEE-OOOOOOOO! EEEEEEEEEEEE-OOOOOOOOOOOOO, EEEEEEEEE-OOOOOOOO! Oh, God. I could make this noise all day! I never want to do anything else!
And now—am I really seeing this? It can't be! Surely there are not colorfully dressed men with powerful bodies, brave expressions, and purposeful toolbelts hanging off the side of the fire truck as it careens around the corner! If this is a dream, let me never wake. Look at their hats! They have the most wonderful hats ever made! I must acquire a child-sized version of such a hat! They are the most large and most yellow hats I have ever seen.
That's it: My fate in this life is sealed. I must become one of these men. Nothing will ever sway me from this goal.
But what a spectacle it is! You must come and look upon this immediately! This fire truck is blowing my mind. It is as if God Himself has created this piece of machinery just for me! But it will not be here long. It is driving away. It grows quieter and quieter as it recedes from my visual field and...
It is gone. It was only here for one fleeting moment, and you never even saw it. This is the greatest tragedy that has ever occurred. My faith in the universe is shaken to its core by the magnitude of what you have missed. If only you had listened to me. You may never be able to comprehend my experience, for I have seen the fire truck, and I will never think about anything else again as long as I live.
Huh? What is... Why... Afgh! Airplane! Airplane! Mommy! Airplane! Don't bother with those towels! Don't you see? Look! There is an actual airplane in the sky!
