Rosa Parks dies

[Odie 0]

Rosa Parks dies; icon of civil rights

Associated Press

10/25/2005 

 

 

Rosa Parks changed history.

 

DETROIT - Rosa Lee Parks, whose refusal to give up her bus seat to a white man sparked the modern civil rights movement, died Monday at age 92.

Mrs. Parks died at her home of natural causes, said Karen Morgan, a spokeswoman for Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich.

 

Mrs. Parks was 42 in 1955 when she committed an act of defiance that was to change the course of American history and earn her the title "mother of the civil rights movement."

 

At that time, Jim Crow laws in effect since the post-Civil War Reconstruction period required separation of the races in buses, restaurants and public accommodations throughout the South, while legally sanctioned racial discrimination kept blacks out of many jobs and neighborhoods in the North.

 

The Montgomery, Ala., seamstress, an active member of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, was riding a city bus Dec. 1, 1955, when a white man demanded her seat.

 

Mrs. Parks refused, despite rules requiring blacks to yield their seats to whites. Two black Montgomery women had been arrested earlier that year on the same charge, but Mrs. Parks was jailed. She also was fined $14.

 

Speaking in 1992, she said history too often maintains "that my feet were hurting and I didn't know why I refused to stand up when they told me. But the real reason of my not standing up was I felt that I had a right to be treated as any other passenger. We had endured that kind of treatment for too long."

 

Her arrest triggered a 381-day boycott of the bus system organized by a then little-known Baptist minister, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who later earned the Nobel Peace Prize for his work.

 

"At the time I was arrested, I had no idea it would turn into this," Mrs. Parks said 30 years later. "It was just a day like any other day. The only thing that made it significant was that the masses of the people joined in."

 

The Montgomery bus boycott, which came one year after the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark declaration that separate schools for blacks and whites were "inherently unequal," marked the start of the modern civil rights movement.

 

The movement culminated in the 1964 federal Civil Rights Act, which banned racial discrimination in public accommodations.

 

After taking her public stand for civil rights, Mrs. Parks had trouble finding work in Alabama. Amid threats and harassment, she and her husband, Raymond, moved to Detroit in 1957. She worked as an aide in Conyers' Detroit office from 1965 until retiring Sept. 30, 1988. Raymond Parks died in 1977.

 

Mrs. Parks became a revered figure in Detroit, where a street and middle school were named for her and a papier-mache likeness of her was featured in the city's Thanksgiving Day Parade.

 

Mrs. Parks said upon retiring from her job with Conyers that she wanted to devote more time to the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development. The institute, incorporated in 1987, is devoted to developing leadership among Detroit's young people and initiating them into the struggle for civil rights.

 

In 1996, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, awarded to civilians making outstanding contributions to American life. In 1999, she was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, the nation's highest civilian honor.

 

She was born Rosa Louise McCauley on Feb. 4, 1913, in Tuskegee, Ala. Family illness interrupted her high school education. But after she married Raymond Parks in 1932, he encouraged her, and she earned a diploma in 1934.

 

Looking back in 1988, Mrs. Parks said she worried that black young people took legal equality for granted.

 

Older blacks, she said "have tried to shield young people from what we have suffered. And in so doing, we seem to have a more complacent attitude.

 

"We must double and redouble our efforts to try to say to our youth, to try to give them an inspiration, an incentive and the will to study our heritage and to know what it means to be black in America today."

[Matt 0]

Rest in peace knowing you've made a difference.

[LordOfTheBorg 1]

Wow, she is amazing.. Hope she rests in peace.

[MrPsychic 1]

Proof that one person can make a difference. Her legacy shall live on.

[youbroughtheryouRiker 2]

Farewell, Mrs. Parks

[Odo 0]

I had the honor of meeting this lady.

She was very soft spoken but very

passionate in her convetions.

A small lady in stature that cast a large

light of needed change in this country.

May her dream and legacy live on.

Rest in peace Miss Parks.

And know people of all races will carry

your dream.