On December 1, 1955, a young woman in Montgomery, Alabama sat down. And like the flap of a butterfly's wings, the ripples began and have continued throughout the decades. She has been revered for her protest, silent as it was. Along with Dr. King, Malcolm X, WEB DuBois, Nelson Mandela and scores of other African Americans, she paved a road often riddled with potholes, toward civil rights. But let's go back in time before Rosa Parks sat. Let us go back to 1501, when Africans began to be enslaved. Today, we would call this human trafficking, and if we found even one of our friends guilty of being involved, would disentangle ourselves from them faster than one could say Knockoff Purses. (But that is a story for another time). We know from our history books the abuse dealt to the slaves- the beatings, the rapes, the death by illness and neglect, the starvation. We know that they often had no one to cling to but the families they made in the fields and in the kitchens- a