It would have been easy enough for Rosa Parks to play it safe. But her tired feet and her weariness with the Deep South social order wouldn’t let her.

And I’m grateful that she listened to her feet and her indignation rather than her fears.

That wasn’t typical for many black people back in 1955, the year that Mrs. Parks, then a 30-year-old Montgomery, Alabama seamstress, refused to give up her bus seat to a white man. That’s because each day, black people had to tiptoe through a minefield of Jim Crow indignities simply to survive; to get back home to their families safe and sound without being  locked up or lynched.

But Mrs. Parks, who died Monday in Detroit at the age of 92, was among the first of the valiant black people who sparked the civil rights movement to realize that any sense of safety that came with acquiescing to unjust laws was a fragile, if not false, sense of safety. And while Mrs. Parks could have chosen the convenient route and given the white man her bus seat to bypass jail and go home, she decided that she’d rather deal with jail than the continued status of second-class citizenship.

That wasn’t an easy stand for a black woman who had steady work at a department store, and who lived fairly well, to take. But someone had to do it. Because as long as black people had no rights, they weren’t safe.

And it was high time for that to change.

Some time ago, I read a book titled “Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South.” Among other things, the book, which won the 2002 Lillian Smith Book Award, chronicles the stories of elderly black people who talk about how, even though they lived in separate worlds, they managed to defy white society’s worse expectations of them by building churches, schools, businesses and other semblances of progress. This was a world that many blacks were content to live in, a world that provided comfort and reassurance from the prevailing racism that was meant to dehumanize them.

But too many times, the racism collided with their world.

One of the interviewees in the book, Theresa Lyons of Durham, N.C., recalled how the black principal of a school was badly beaten by some white people for daring to try to purchase meat at a store. This was during World War II, a time when most things were being rationed. According to Lyons, they told the principal that they didn’t sell meat to niggers, and that he was out of his place for asking. Lyons also said that if you were black, the stores wouldn’t sell you Coke. You could only buy Pepsi.

So basically, when it came to staying safe, the white people could change the boundaries at whim. And usually, those boundaries were drawn by ignorance, fear and jealousy.

Nowhere was this clearer than in the 1920s, when the entire town of Rosewood, Florida, a prosperous black town in which blacks had schools, businesses and shops, was burned to the ground after a white woman lied about being raped by a black man there. For a long time, the black people in Rosewood had done well without socializing with whites, and without thinking about doing the things that tended to strike fear into the hearts of whites at that time -- things like interracial marriage and such. So Rosewood should have been safe from the wrath of whites, but as it turns out, it wasn’t. And the whites who burned Rosewood didn’t care about protecting the honor of that lying tramp. All they cared about protecting was their privilege.

That’s why it took someone like Mrs. Parks to come along.

When Mrs. Parks -- who, incidentally, was put off the bus 12 years earlier after refusing to enter again from the back after paying her fare up front -- made her stand in 1955, she ripped the fallacy off the notion that blacks were content to live in separate worlds and to be governed by Jim Crow rules; rules that reflected the whims of racist whites who believed that their prosperity depended on our oppression. But more than that, Mrs. Parks showed other black people that as long as Jim Crow was creeping into their daily lives, they stood to be victimized by it in big ways -- and that the only way to be safe from it was not to retreat from it, but to fight it head on. By doing what she did, Mrs. Parks became one of the last black heroines to hail from a culture of courageousness, a woman who made a sacrifice that ultimately changed the big picture for black progress in this country rather than just the next frame.

May God rest her soul.