A gospel choir, lived testimony and civic reflection revealed why remembrance, music and legislation still matter in an unfinished struggle for justice as people participated recently in a Rosa Parks Day Commemoration Service.
Wednesday night’s service at the Bulfinch Meetinghouse in Lancaster was not an event that pretended to solve the world’s problems. It did something quieter, and perhaps more necessary: it asked us to notice who we are, where we are, and what it means to gather anyway.
The room itself told a broad story before a single word was spoken. A national landmark building designed by America’s first architect, Charles Bulfinch, under a Revere Bell, filled with mostly white faces — though not entirely so — assembled to honor a Black woman whose courage reshaped the moral and civic landscape of this country.
These facts alone carried tension, humility and responsibility. They raised unspoken questions about distance and belonging, about who is remembered and who is present, about how history is honored without Rosa being reduced to a simple symbol of a polite seamstress who was tired one day, rather than a trained activist who knowingly defied an unjust system. The gathering did not resolve those questions, but it did not avoid them either.
Into that space came a powerful gospel choir, Kingdom Voices of Glory, under the direction of Kirosha Sidelca, whose music refused to be ornamental. Gospel does not exist to decorate remembrance; it exists to carry survival, joy, defiance and faith all at once.
When the choir sang, the room changed. The music did not ask permission from the architecture or the demographics. It filled the space with a tradition forged in struggle and sustained by hope, reminding everyone present that the story of Rosa Parks is not only civic but spiritual. It is a story about dignity claimed when denial was the law of the land.
The evening also made room for voice and interpretation in deeply personal ways. The church’s Lay Minister, Sedie Maruska, herself a Black woman, recited an essay in which she portrayed Rosa Parks — not as a distant historical figure, but as a living presence shaped by conviction, fatigue and resolve. Her portrayal grounded the service in lived experience, reminding the room that remembrance is not abstract and that who tells the story matters.
Music continued to do its quiet work of bridging worlds. The church’s organist, Kallin Johnson, a white man, offered the music of Scott Joplin alongside a deeply felt rendition of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” as the congregation came forward one at a time to light a candle on the altar. His playing was not an imitation or a performance of reverence; it was an act of listening made audible.
Afterward, the gospel choir’s director, Kirosha, shared with him that his playing brought her to tears, because it reminded her of her own father’s style at the piano. In that moment, the evening revealed something rare: not appropriation, but connection — music crossing generations and identities without losing its soul.
Two politicians spoke as well. Massachusetts state Rep. Michael Kushmerek, D-Fitchburg, who helped us get the Rosa Parks Day Bill passed into law last year, and state Rep. Meghan Kilcoyne, D-Sterling, from our church’s congressional district.
They reminded us of something both simple and easily forgotten: the legislative process almost always begins with a single person and a single idea. Laws do not descend from the heavens fully formed. They are born from conscience, persistence, and the stubborn belief that the world can be made more just, one measure at a time.
Rosa Parks Day itself exists because for seven years I forced myself to insist, both to Rep. Kushmerek as well as his predecessor, Rep. Stephen Hay, that remembrance is not passive — that naming matters, that commemoration can be an act of moral formation. Especially in this divisive time.
This reminder landed with particular force in a time when cynicism about institutions runs deep. It is tempting to believe that legislation is too slow, too compromised, too broken to matter. Yet the evening demanded otherwise. It compelled us to remember that Rosa Parks’ refusal was not only symbolic; it was catalytic. It set into motion organizing, boycotts, court cases, and laws. The arc from a bus seat to a statewide holiday in her name, the ninth such in our nation (so far), is not straight, but it is real.
Still, the service did not pretend that honoring Rosa Parks, or even passing legislation in her name, completes the work she began. That honesty is part of what made the night meaningful. A single event does not dismantle systemic racism. A single service does not repair centuries of injustice. A few songs, however moving, do not liberate the oppressed. And yet — this is the paradox the evening held so carefully—single acts still matter.
What we experienced Wednesday night was not closure; it was formation. We experienced what it feels like to sit with history rather than to consume it. We felt the discomfort of being reminded that admiration without accountability is hollow. We felt the invitation to see ourselves not as spectators to the past but as participants in an unfinished story.
The presence of a mostly white congregation honoring a Black freedom fighter is not a failure; it is a responsibility. It means that remembrance must lead somewhere. It must shape how power is used, how policies are pursued, how voices are amplified, and how silence is resisted. The service did not offer easy assurances. Instead, it offered a shared moment of clarity: justice is built through accumulation — of courage, of laws, of songs, of people willing to show up even when they know it is not enough.
That is why the night mattered. And all commemorations like it. Not because it solved anything, but because it reminded us that change rarely arrives all at once. It arrives through rooms like that one, through voices willing to embody memory, through music that dares to listen across difference, through legislation born of moral imagination and through people willing to sit with complexity rather than turn away from it.
Rosa Parks once said that the only tired she was, was tired of giving in. Wednesday night, in a historic meetinghouse filled with testimony, song, and careful listening, we honored that refusal. And in doing so, we were quietly asked what we, too, might be tired of accepting — and what small, faithful act we might yet choose to begin.
Wil Darcangelo, M.Div, is an ordained Unitarian Universalist minister of the First Church of Lancaster at the Bulfinch Meetinghouse in Massachusetts, progressive theologian and essayist on optimistic spirituality in the Information Age. Follow him on Substack, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.