Word: tested
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Parks was not the first to be detained for this offense. Eight months earlier, Claudette Colvin, 15, refused to give up her seat and was arrested. Black activists met with this girl to determine if she would make a good test case--as secretary of the local N.A.A.C.P., Parks attended the meeting--but it was decided that a more "upstanding" candidate was necessary to withstand the scrutiny of the courts and the press. And then in October, a young woman named Mary Louise Smith was arrested; N.A.A.C.P. leaders rejected her too as their vehicle, looking for someone more able...
...arrest, local civil rights leader E.D. Nixon exclaimed, "My God, look what segregation has put in my hands!" Parks was not only above moral reproach (securely married, reasonably employed) but possessed a quiet fortitude as well as political savvy--in short, she was the ideal plaintiff for a test case...
...overemphasizing Calcuttans' destitution and of coercing conversion from the defenseless. In the context of lost causes, Mother Teresa took on battles she knew she could win. Taken together, it seems to me, the criticisms of her work do not undermine or topple her overall achievement. The real test might be, Did she inspire followers, skeptics and even opponents to larger acts of kindness or greater visions of possibility? If the church demands hard evidence of a miracle for sainthood, the transformation of many hearts might make the strongest case...
...stirring has been the effect of the solemn-eyed, cheerful, moody, funny, self-critical, other-critical teenager on those who have read her story that it became a test of ethics to ask a journalist, If you had proof the diary was a fraud, would you expose it? The point was that there are some stories the world so needs to believe that it would be profane to impair their influence. All the same, the Book of Anne has inspired a panoply of responses--plays, movies, documentaries, biographies, a critical edition of the diary--all in the service of understanding...
...this has made her more "useful," in her terms, as a recognizable human being. She was not simply born blessed with generosity; she struggled toward it by way of self-doubt, impatience, rage, ennui--all things that test the value of a mind. Readers enjoy quoting the diary's sweetest line--"I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are still truly good at heart"--but the passage that follows is more revealing: "I simply can't build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery and death. I see the world gradually being turned into...