The first time I saw John V., he was dressed in a shirt that was dirty, and ragged, and much too small for his six-foot frame. He was walking on the right shoulder of a long stretch of road that led to our rural school. His head was bent, and his shoulders sagged, the way people shrink inside of themselves when they have little reason to live.
He was fifteen.
His family was poor, dirt poor, as they used to say in Oklahoma, and it wasn’t unusual to see him, or one of his siblings, combing through trashcans, looking for food.
Like many poor people, he was treated as an outcast. Almost every person he met ignored him, and the school bullies made a point of embarrassing him.
I was raised to be a non-violent person. From the first moment I entered school, until I was sixteen, my mother frequently admonished me to walk away from fights.
But, on one warm September day in 1964, I spotted a group of thugs attacking John V., and something inside of me snapped. A lineman for our school’s football team had trapped John against the fence and was taunting him, repeatedly shoving him against the railing while other members of the team watched and laughed.
Without thinking, I rushed to where they were standing and thrust myself between them.
“Back off,” I said.
The football player looked at me and laughed. I was only five-foot seven and very thin, not much of a threat to anyone, and he was much larger, outweighing me by at least a hundred pounds.
“Why, are you going to stop me?”
“Just back off, that’s all. He’ not hurting you.”
He lunged at me, and without thinking, I hit him squarely on the jaw, and he crumpled at my feet.
It was the first time in my life that I had struck another human being, and the experience left me ashamed of my actions. I did not believe, and still do not believe, in resorting to violence to win an argument.
But from that day forward, no one in our school bothered John again.
I have always hated cruelty.
To me, debasing another human being -- or any living entity -- represents the lowest of all human experiences. No matter the race, sexual preference, religious beliefs, or financial status of a man or woman, I do not believe any other human being has the right to decide how that person should live.
That is why I admire people with courage, people like the lone Tiananmen Square protester who defied the Chinese government by standing in front of a long queue of tanks that had been used to squash dissent.
That is the reason Rosa Parks nspired me to join the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
Parks recalled going to elementary school in Pine Level, where school buses took white students to their new school and black students had to walk to theirs:
"I'd see the bus pass every day... But to me, that was a way of life; we had no choice but to accept what was the custom. The bus was among the first ways I realized there was a black world and a white world."
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People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.
Now, that Wendy Davis has clearly demonstrated that one courageous person can stand on principle and make a difference, I have added her name to the list of people I admire.
And the next time someone says that compromise is the only way to get things done in Washington; remind them of Wendy Davis's accomplishment. She didn’t compromise.
She won.