Hello my friends,
Febuary is Womens Black History Month.
Lets Honour our amazing Women, who stood couragously by them selves to change the world and the way the world looked at things.
Rosa Parks
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Rosa Louise McCauley Parks (February 4, 1913 – October 24, 2005) was an African American civil rights activist and seamstress whom the U.S. Congress dubbed the "Mother of the Modern-Day Civil Rights Movement".
Parks is famous for her refusal on December 1, 1955 to obey bus driver James Blake's demand that she relinquish her seat to a white passenger. Her subsequent arrest and trial for this act of civil disobedience triggered the Montgomery Bus Boycott, one of the largest and most successful mass movements against racial segregation in history, and launched Martin Luther King, Jr.,
one of the organizers of the boycott, to the forefront of the civil
rights movement. Her role in American history earned her an iconic
status in American culture, and her actions have left an enduring
legacy for civil rights movements around the world.
Early years
Rosa Parks was born Rosa Louise McCauley in Tuskegee, Alabama on February 4, 1913 to James and Leona McCauley, respectively, a carpenter and a teacher. Small, even for a child, she suffered poor health and had chronic tonsillitis. When her parents separated, she moved with her mother to Pine Level, Alabama, just outside Montgomery.
There she grew up on a farm with her maternal grandparents, mother, and
younger brother Sylvester, and began her lifelong membership in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. She was homeschooled
by her mother until she was eleven, then enrolled at the Industrial
School for Girls in Montgomery where she took academic and vocational
courses. Parks then went on to a laboratory school set up by the Alabama State Teachers College for Negroes
for secondary education, but was forced to drop out to care for her
grandmother, and later for her mother, after they became ill.
Under Jim Crow laws, black and white people were segregated in virtually every aspect of daily life in the South,
including public transportation. Bus and train companies did not
provide separate vehicles for the different races, but did enforce
seating policies that allocated separate sections for blacks and
whites. School bus transportation, however, was unavailable in any form
for black schoolchildren in the South. Parks recalled going to
elementary school in Pine Level, where school buses took white students
to their new school and black students had to walk to theirs: "I'd see
the bus pass every day… But to me, that was a way of life; we had no
choice but to accept what was the custom. The bus was among the first
ways I realized there was a black world and a white world."
Though Parks' autobiography recounts that some of her earliest
memories are of the kindness of white strangers, her situation made it
impossible to ignore racism. When the Ku Klux Klan
marched down the street in front of her house, Parks recalls her
grandfather guarding the front door with a shotgun. The Montgomery
Industrial School, founded and staffed by white Northerners for black
children, was burned twice by arsonists, and its faculty was ostracized by the white community.
In 1932, Rosa married Raymond Parks, a barber from Montgomery, at her mother's house. Raymond was a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), at the time collecting money to support the Scottsboro Boys,
a group of black men falsely accused of raping two white women. After
her marriage, Rosa took a number of jobs, ranging from domestic worker
to hospital aide. At her husband's urging, she finished her high school
studies in 1933, at a time when less than 7% of African Americans had a
high school diploma. Despite the Jim Crow laws that made political
participation by black people difficult, she succeeded in registering
to vote on her third try.
In December 1943, Parks became active in the Civil Rights Movement, joined the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP, and was elected volunteer secretary to its president, Edgar Nixon.
Of her position, she later said, "I was the only woman there, and they
needed a secretary, and I was too timid to say no." She would continue
as secretary until 1957. In the 1940s, Parks and her husband were also
members of the Voters' League. Sometime soon after 1944, she held a
brief job at Maxwell Air Force Base, a federally owned area where racial segregation
was not allowed, and rode on an integrated trolley. Speaking to her
biographer, Parks noted, "You might just say Maxwell opened my eyes
up." Parks also worked as a housekeeper and seamstress for a white
couple, Clifford and Virginia Durr. The politically liberal Durrs became her friends, and encouraged Parks to attend, and eventually helped sponsor her at the Highlander Folk School, an education center for workers' rights and racial equality in Monteagle, Tennessee, in the summer of 1955.
Like many black people, Parks was deeply moved by the brutal murder of Emmett Till
in August 1955. On November 27, 1955—only four days before she refused
to give up her seat—she later recalled that she had attended a mass
meeting in Montgomery which focused on this case as well as the recent
murders of George W. Lee and Lamar Smith. The featured speaker at the meeting was T.R.M. Howard, a black civil rights leader from Mississippi who headed the Regional Council of Negro Leadership. People also said that Rosa Parks was "Sweet and soft spoken but made a statement that screamed so loud."
Civil rights activism
Events leading up to boycott
- See also: Homer Plessy and Plessy v. Ferguson
In 1944, athletic star Jackie Robinson took a similar stand in a confrontation with an Army officer in Fort Hood, Texas, refusing to move to the back of a bus. Robinson was brought before a court-martial, which acquitted him.[1] The NAACP had accepted and litigated other cases before, such as that of Irene Morgan ten years earlier, which resulted in a victory in the U.S. Supreme Court on Commerce Clause
grounds. That victory, however, overturned state segregation laws only
insofar as they applied to travel in interstate commerce, such as
interstate bus travel. Black activists had begun to build a case around
the arrest of a 15-year-old girl, Claudette Colvin, a student at Booker T. Washington High School in Montgomery. On March 2, 1955,
Colvin was handcuffed, arrested and forcibly removed from a public bus
when she refused to give up her seat to a white man. She claimed that
her constitutional rights were being violated. At the time, Colvin was
active in the NAACP's Youth Council, a group to which Rosa Parks served
as Advisor.
Colvin recollected, "Mrs. Parks said, 'do what is right.'" Parks was raising money for Colvin's defense, but when E.D. Nixon
learned that Colvin was pregnant, it was decided that Colvin was an
unsuitable symbol for their cause. Soon after her arrest she had
conceived a child with a much older married man, a moral transgression
that scandalized the deeply religious black community. Strategists
believed that the segregationist white press would use Colvin's
pregnancy to undermine any boycott. The NAACP also had considered, but
rejected, earlier protesters deemed unable or unsuitable to withstand
the pressures of cross-examination in a legal challenge to racial
segregation laws. Colvin was also known to engage in verbal outbursts
and cursing. Many of the legal charges against Colvin were dropped. A
boycott and legal case never materialized from the Colvin case law, and
legal strategists continued to seek a complainant beyond reproach.[2]
In Montgomery, Alabama,
the first four rows of bus seats were reserved for white people. Buses
had "colored" sections for black people—who made up more than 75 % of
the bus system's riders—generally in the rear of the bus. These
sections were not fixed in size, but were determined by the placement
of a movable sign. Black people also could sit in the middle rows,
until the white section was full. Then they had to move to seats in the
rear, stand, or, if there was no room, leave the bus. Black people were
not allowed to sit across the aisle from white people. The driver also
could move the "colored" section sign, or remove it altogether. If
white people were already sitting in the front, black people could
board to pay the fare, but then had to disembark and reenter through
the rear door. There were times when the bus departed before the black
customers who had paid made it to the back entrance.
For years, the black community had complained that the situation was
unfair, and Parks was no exception: "My resisting being mistreated on
the bus did not begin with that particular arrest…I did a lot of
walking in Montgomery." Parks had her first run-in on the public bus on
a rainy day in 1943, when the bus driver, James Blake,
demanded that she get off the bus and reenter through the back door. As
she began to exit by the front door, she dropped her purse. Parks sat
down for a moment in a seat for white passengers, apparently to pick up
her purse. The bus driver was enraged and barely let her step off the
bus before speeding off. Rosa walked more than five miles home in the
rain.
Montgomery Bus Boycott
-
Fingerprint card of Rosa Parks.
After a day at work at Montgomery Fair department store, Parks boarded the Cleveland Avenue bus at around 6 p.m., Thursday, December 1, 1955,
in downtown Montgomery. She paid her fare and sat in an empty seat in
the first row of back seats reserved for blacks in the "colored"
section, which was near the middle of the bus and directly behind the
ten seats reserved for white passengers. Initially, she had not noticed
that the bus driver was the same man, James F. Blake,
who had left her in the rain in 1943. As the bus traveled along its
regular route, all of the white-only seats in the bus filled up. The
bus reached the third stop in front of the Empire Theater, and several
white passengers boarded.
In 1900, Montgomery had passed a city ordinance for the purpose of
segregating passengers by race. Conductors were given the power to
assign seats to accomplish that purpose; however, no passengers would
be required to move or give up their seat and stand if the bus was
crowded and no other seats were available. Over time and by custom,
however, Montgomery bus drivers had adopted the practice of requiring
black riders to move whenever there were no white only seats left.
So, following standard practice, bus driver Blake noted that the
front of the bus was filled with white passengers and there were two or
three men standing, and thus moved the "colored" section sign behind
Parks and demanded that four black people give up their seats in the
middle section so that the white passengers could sit. Years later, in
recalling the events of the day, Parks said, "When that white driver
stepped back toward us, when he waved his hand and ordered us up and
out of our seats, I felt a determination cover my body like a quilt on
a winter night."
By Parks' account, Blake said, "Y'all better make it light on yourselves and let me have those seats." [3]
Three of them complied. Parks said, "The driver wanted us to stand up,
the four of us. We didn't move at the beginning, but he says, 'Let me
have these seats.' And the other three people moved, but I didn't." [4]
The black man sitting next to her gave up his seat. Parks moved, but
toward the window seat; she did not get up to move to the newly
repositioned colored section.[5]
Blake then said, "Why don't you stand up?" Parks responded, "I don't
think I should have to stand up." Blake called the police to arrest
Parks. When recalling the incident for Eyes on the Prize,
a 1987 public television series on the Civil Rights Movement, Parks
said, "When he saw me still sitting, he asked if I was going to stand
up, and I said, 'No, I'm not.' And he said, 'Well, if you don't stand
up, I'm going to have to call the police and have you arrested.' I
said, 'You may do that.'"
During a 1956 radio interview with Sydney Rogers in West Oakland
several months after her arrest, when asked why she had decided not to
vacate her bus seat, Parks said, "I would have to know for once and for
all what rights I had as a human being and a citizen of Montgomery,
Alabama."
She also detailed her motivation in her autobiography, My Story[6]
| “ |
People always say that I
didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. I was
not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of
a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me
as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired
of giving in. |
” |
Police report on Rosa Parks, December 1, 1955, page 1.
When Parks refused to give up her seat, a police officer arrested
her. As the officer took her away, she recalled that she asked, "Why do
you push us around?" The officer's response as she remembered it was,
"I don't know, but the law's the law, and you're under arrest." She
later said, "I only knew that, as I was being arrested, that it was the
very last time that I would ever ride in humiliation of this kind."
Parks was charged with a violation of Chapter 6, Section 11
segregation law of the Montgomery City code, even though she
technically had not taken up a white-only seat—she had been in a
colored section. E.D. Nixon and Clifford Durr bailed Parks out of jail
the evening of December 1.
That evening, Nixon conferred with Alabama State College professor Jo Ann Robinson about Parks' case. Robinson, a member of the Women's Political Council (WPC), stayed up all night mimeographing
over 35,000 handbills announcing a bus boycott. The Women's Political
Council was the first group to officially endorse the boycott.
On Sunday, December 4, 1955, plans for the Montgomery Bus Boycott were announced at black churches in the area, and a front-page article in The Montgomery Advertiser
helped spread the word. At a church rally that night, attendees
unanimously agreed to continue the boycott until they were treated with
the level of courtesy they expected, until black drivers were hired,
and until seating in the middle of the bus was handled on a first-come
basis.
Four days later, Parks was tried on charges of disorderly conduct and violating a local ordinance. The trial lasted 30 minutes. Parks was found guilty and fined $10, plus $4 in court costs.[7] Parks appealed her conviction and formally challenged the legality of racial segregation. In a 1992 interview with National Public Radio's Lynn Neary, Parks recalled:
| “ |
I did not want to be
mistreated, I did not want to be deprived of a seat that I had paid
for. It was just time... there was opportunity for me to take a stand
to express the way I felt about being treated in that manner. I had not
planned to get arrested. I had plenty to do without having to end up in
jail. But when I had to face that decision, I didn't hesitate to do so
because I felt that we had endured that too long. The more we gave in,
the more we complied with that kind of treatment, the more oppressive
it became. |
” |
Police report on Rosa Parks, December 1, 1955, page 2.
On Monday, December 5, 1955,
after the success of the one-day boycott, a group of 16 to 18 people
gathered at the Mt. Zion AME Zion Church to discuss boycott strategies.
The group agreed that a new organization was needed to lead the boycott
effort if it were to continue. Rev. Ralph David Abernathy suggested the name "Montgomery Improvement Association"
(MIA). The name was adopted, and the MIA was formed. Its members
elected as their president a relative newcomer to Montgomery, a young
and mostly unknown minister of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
That Monday night, 50 leaders of the African American community
gathered to discuss the proper actions to be taken in response to
Parks' arrest. E.D. Nixon said, "My God, look what segregation has put
in my hands!" Parks was the ideal plaintiff for a test case against
city and state segregation laws. While the 15-year-old Claudette Colvin,
unwed and pregnant, had been deemed unacceptable to be the center of a
civil rights mobilization, King stated that, "Mrs. Parks, on the other
hand, was regarded as one of the finest citizens of Montgomery—not one
of the finest Negro citizens, but one of the finest citizens of
Montgomery." Parks was securely married and employed, possessed a quiet
and dignified demeanor, and was politically savvy.
Deputy Sheriff D.H. Lackey fingerprints Parks on
December 1,
1955 during the bus boycott arrests.
The day of Parks' trial—Monday, December 5, 1955—the
WPC distributed the 35,000 leaflets. The handbill read, "We are…asking
every Negro to stay off the buses Monday in protest of the arrest and
trial…. You can afford to stay out of school for one day. If you work,
take a cab, or walk. But please, children and grown-ups, don't ride the
bus at all on Monday. Please stay off the buses Monday."[8]
It rained that day, but the black community persevered in their
boycott. Some rode in carpools, while others traveled in black-operated
cabs that charged the same fare as the bus, 10 cents. Most of the
remainder of the 40,000 black commuters walked, some as far as 20
miles. In the end, the boycott lasted for 382 days. Dozens of public
buses stood idle for months, severely damaging the bus transit
company's finances, until the law requiring segregation on public buses
was lifted.
Some segregationists retaliated with terrorism. Black churches were
burned or dynamited. Martin Luther King's home was bombed in the early
morning hours of January 30, 1956, and E.D. Nixon's home was also
attacked. However, the black community's bus boycott marked one of the
largest and most successful mass movements against racial segregation.
It sparked many other protests, and it catapulted King to the forefront
of the Civil Rights Movement.
Through her role in sparking the boycott, Rosa Parks played an
important part in internationalizing the awareness of the plight of
African Americans and the civil rights struggle. King wrote in his 1958
book Stride Toward Freedom
that Parks' arrest was the precipitating factor, rather than the cause,
of the protest: "The cause lay deep in the record of similar
injustices…. Actually, no one can understand the action of Mrs. Parks
unless he realizes that eventually the cup of endurance runs over, and
the human personality cries out, 'I can take it no longer.'"
The Montgomery bus boycott was also the inspiration for the bus boycott in the township of Alexandria, Eastern Cape of South Africa which was one of the key events in the radicalization of the black majority of that country under the leadership of the African National Congress.
Browder v. Gayle
-
Immediately after the initiation of the bus boycott, legal
strategists began to discuss the need for a federal lawsuit to
challenge city and state bus segregation laws, and approximately two
months after the boycott began, they reconsidered Claudette Colvin's
case. Attorneys Fred Gray, E.D. Nixon and Clifford Durr
(a white lawyer who, with his wife, Virginia, was an activist in the
Civil Rights Movement and a former employer of Parks) searched for the
ideal case law to challenge the constitutional legitimacy of city and
state bus segregation laws. Parks' case was not used as the basis for
the federal lawsuit because, as a criminal case, it would have had to
make its way through the state criminal appeals process before a
federal appeal could have been filed. City and state officials could
have delayed a final rendering for years. Furthermore, attorney Durr
believed it possible that the outcome would merely have been the
vacating of Parks' conviction, with no changes in segregation laws.[9]
Gray researched for a better lawsuit, consulting with NAACP legal counsels Robert Carter and Thurgood Marshall, who would later become U.S. Solicitor General and a U.S. Supreme Court justice.
Gray approached Aurelia Browder, Susie McDonald, Claudette Colvin and
Mary Louise Smith, all women who had had disputes involving the
Montgomery bus system the previous year. They all agreed to become
plaintiffs in a civil action law suit. Browder was a Montgomery
housewife, Gayle the mayor of Montgomery. On February 1, 1956, the case of Browder v. Gayle was filed in U.S. District Court by Fred Gray. It was Browder v. Gayle that brought segregation to an end on public buses.[10]
On June 19, 1956,
the U.S. District Court's three-judge panel ruled that Section 301
(31a, 31b and 31c) of Title 48, Code of Alabama, 1940, as amended, and
Sections 10 and 11 of Chapter 6 of the Code of the City of Montgomery,
1952, "deny and deprive plaintiffs and other Negro citizens similarly
situated of the equal protection of the laws and due process of law
secured by the Fourteenth Amendment" (Browder v. Gayle, 1956). The court essentially decided that the precedent of Brown v. Board of Education (1954) could be applied to Browder v. Gayle. On November 13, 1956, the United States Supreme Court outlawed racial segregation on buses, deeming it unconstitutional. The court order arrived in Montgomery, Alabama, on December 20, 1956,
and the bus boycott ended the next day. However, more violence erupted
following the court order, as snipers fired into buses and into King's
home, and terrorists threw bombs into churches and into the homes of
many church ministers, including Martin Luther King Jr.'s friend Ralph
Abernathy.[11]
Later years
Rosa Parks on a
Montgomery bus on
December 21,
1956,
the day Montgomery's public transportation system was legally
integrated. Behind Parks is Nicholas C. Chriss, a UPI reporter covering
the event.
After her arrest, Parks became an icon of the Civil Rights Movement,
but suffered hardships as a result. She lost her job at the department
store, and her husband quit his job after his boss forbade him from
talking about his wife or the legal case. Parks traveled and spoke
extensively. In 1957, Raymond and Rosa Parks left Montgomery for
Hampton, Virginia—mostly because she was unable to find work, but also
because of disagreements with King and other leaders of Montgomery's
struggling civil rights movement. In Hampton, she found a job as a
hostess in an inn at black Hampton Institute.
Later that year, after the urging of her younger brother Sylvester
Parks, her husband Raymond, and her mother Leona McCauley, moved to Detroit, Michigan.
Parks worked as a seamstress until 1965 when African-American U.S. Representative John Conyers (D-Michigan)
hired her as a secretary and receptionist for his congressional office
in Detroit. She held this position until she retired in 1988.[10] In a telephone interview with CNN on October 24, 2005,
Conyers recalled, "You treated her with deference because she was so
quiet, so serene—just a very special person…. There is only one Rosa
Parks." Later in life, Parks also served as a member of the Board of
Advocates of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
Rosa Parks and Elaine Eason Steele co-founded the Rosa and Raymond
Parks Institute for Self Development in February 1987, in honor of
Rosa's husband, who died from cancer in 1977. The institute runs the
"Pathways to Freedom" bus tours, which introduce young people to
important civil rights and Underground Railroad
sites throughout the country. On a 1997 trip, the Pathways to Freedom
bus drove into a river, resulting in the death of Adisa Foluke. Foluke,
who was referred to as Parks' adopted grandson, also had been a chaperon on the bus. Several others were injured.
In 1992, Parks published Rosa Parks: My Story, an
autobiography aimed at younger readers which details her life leading
up to her decision not to give up her seat. In 1995, she published her
memoirs, titled Quiet Strength, which focuses on the role that her faith had played in her life.
On August 30, 1994,
Joseph Skipper, an African-American drug addict, attacked the then
81-year-old Parks in her home. The incident sparked outrage throughout
America. After his arrest, Skipper said that he had not known he was in
Parks' home, but recognized her after entering. Skipper asked, "Hey,
aren't you Rosa Parks?" to which she replied, "Yes." She handed him $3
when he demanded money, and an additional $50 when he demanded more.
Before fleeing, Skipper struck Parks in the face.[12]
Skipper was arrested and charged with various breaking and entering
offenses against Parks and other neighborhood victims. He admitted
guilt and, on August 8, 1995, was sentenced to eight to 15 years in prison.[13]
A comedic scene in the 2002 film Barbershop featured a cantankerous barber, played by Cedric the Entertainer,
arguing with co-workers and shop patrons that other African Americans
before Parks had resisted giving up their seats in defiance of Jim Crow
laws, and that she had received undeserved fame because of her status
as an NAACP secretary. Activists Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton launched a boycott against the film, contending it was "disrespectful", but then-NAACP president Kweisi Mfume stated he thought the controversy was "overblown."[14] The scene also offended Parks, who boycotted the NAACP 2003 Image Awards
ceremony, which Cedric hosted. "Barbershop" received nominations in
four awards categories that, including a "Best Supporting Actor in a
Motion Picture" nomination for Cedric. He did not win in that category,
however, but won an award for his work as a supporting actor in the
television series The Proud Family.
Lawsuits
In March 1999, a lawsuit was filed on Parks' behalf against American hip-hop duo OutKast and LaFace Records,
claiming that the group had illegally used Rosa Parks' name without her
permission for the song "Rosa Parks", the most successful radio single
of OutKast's 1998 album Aquemini.
The song's chorus, which Parks' legal defense felt was disrespectful to
Parks, is as follows: "Ah ha, hush that fuss / Everybody move to the
back of the bus / Do you want to bump and slump with us / We the type
of people make the club get crunk."
The case was dismissed in November 1999 by US District Court Judge Barbara Hackett. In August 2000, Parks hired attorney Johnnie Cochran
to help her appeal the district court's decision. Cochran argued that
the song did not have First Amendment protection because, although its
title carried Parks' name, its lyrics were not about her. However, U.S.
District Judge Barbara Hackett upheld OutKast's right to use Parks'
name in November 1999, and Parks took the case to the 6th U.S. Circuit
Court of Appeals, where some charges were remanded for further trial.
Parks' attorneys and caretaker, Elaine Steele, refiled in August 2004, and named BMG, Arista Records and LaFace Records as the defendants, along with several parties not directly connected to the songs, including Barnes & Noble and Borders Group
for selling the songs, and Gregory Dark and Braddon Mendelson, the
director and producer, respectively, of the 1998 music video, asking
for $5 billion in damages.
In October 2004, U.S. District Judge George Caram Steeh appointed Dennis Archer,
a former mayor of Detroit and Michigan Supreme Court justice, as
guardian of legal matters for Parks after her family expressed concerns
that her caretakers and her lawyer was pursuing the case based on their
own financial interest.[15]
"My auntie would never, ever go to this length to hurt some young
artists trying to make it in the world," Parks' niece Rhea McCauley
said in an Associated Press
interview. "As a family, our fear is that during her last days Auntie
Rosa will be surrounded by strangers trying to make money off of her
name."[16]
The lawsuit was settled April 15, 2005.
In the settlement agreement, OutKast and their producer and recorded
labels paid Parks an undisclosed cash settlement and agreed to work
with the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development in
creating educational programs about the life of Rosa Parks. The record
labels and OutKast admitted to no wrongdoing. It is not known whether
Parks' legal fees were paid for from her settlement money or by the
record companies.[17]
Death and funeral
Rosa Parks resided in Detroit until she died at the age of 92 on October 24, 2005, at about 19:00 EDT, in her apartment on the east side of the city. She had been diagnosed with progressive dementia in 2004.
City officials in Montgomery and Detroit announced on October 27
that the front seats of their city buses would be reserved with black
ribbons in honor of Parks until her funeral. Parks' coffin was flown to
Montgomery, Alabama and taken in a horse-drawn hearse to the St. Paul African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church, where she lay in repose at the altar, dressed in the uniform of a church deaconess, on October 29. A memorial service was held there the following morning, and one of the speakers, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice,
said that if it had not been for Rosa Parks, she would probably have
never become the Secretary of State. In the evening the casket was
transported to Washington, D.C. and taken, aboard a bus similar to the one in which she made her protest, to lie in honor
in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda (making her the first woman and second
African American ever to receive this honor). An estimated 50,000
people viewed the casket there, and the event was broadcast on
television on October 31. This was followed by another memorial service at a different St. Paul AME church in Washington on the afternoon of October 31. For two days, she lay in repose at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit, Michigan.
Parks' funeral service, seven hours long, was held on Wednesday, November 2, at the Greater Grace Temple Church. After the funeral service, an honor guard from the Michigan National Guard
laid the U.S. flag over the casket and carried it to a horse-drawn
hearse, which had been intended to carry it, in daylight, to the
cemetery. As the hearse passed the thousands of people who had turned
out to view the procession, many clapped and released white balloons.
Rosa was interred between her husband and mother at Detroit's Woodlawn
Cemetery in the chapel's mausoleum. (The chapel was renamed the Rosa L.
Parks Freedom Chapel just after her death.)[18]
Parks had previously prepared and placed a headstone on the selected
location with the inscription "Rosa L. Parks, wife, 1913–".
Awards and honors
Rosa Parks with the NAACP's highest award, the
Spingarn Medal, in 1979.
Parks received most of her national accolades very late in life,
with relatively few awards and honors being given to her until many
decades after the Montgomery Bus Boycott. In 1979, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People awarded Parks the Spingarn Medal, its highest honor, and she received the Martin Luther King Jr. Award the next year. She was inducted into the Michigan Women's Hall of Fame in 1983 for her achievements in civil rights. In 1990, she was called at the last moment to be part of the group welcoming Nelson Mandela, who had just been released from his imprisonment in South Africa.
Upon spotting her in the reception line, Mandela called out her name
and, hugging her, said, "You sustained me while I was in prison all
those years." [19]
Parks received the Rosa Parks Peace Prize in 1994 in Stockholm, Sweden. On September 9, 1996, President Bill Clinton presented Parks with the Presidential Medal of Freedom,
the highest honor given by the U.S. executive branch. In 1998, she
became the first recipient of the International Freedom Conductor Award
given by the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center. The next year, Parks was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest award given by the U.S. legislative branch and also received the Detroit-Windsor International Freedom Festival Freedom Award. Parks was a guest of President Bill Clinton during his 1999 State of the Union Address. Also that year, Time magazine named Parks one of the 20 most influential and iconic figures of the twentieth century.[20]
In 2000, her home state awarded her the Alabama Academy of Honor, as
well as the first Governor's Medal of Honor for Extraordinary Courage.
She was also awarded two dozen honorary doctorates from universities
worldwide, and was made an honorary member of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority.
The Rosa Parks Library and Museum on the campus of Troy University in Montgomery, Alabama, was dedicated to her on December 1, 2000.
It is located on the corner where Parks boarded the famed bus. The most
popular items in the museum are the interactive bus arrest of Mrs.
Parks and a sculpture of Parks sitting on a bus bench. The documentary
"Mighty Times: The Legacy of Rosa Parks" received a 2002 nomination for
Academy Award for Documentary Short Subject. She also collaborated that year in a TV movie of her life starring Angela Bassett.
The United States Senate passed a resolution on October 27, 2005 to honor Parks by allowing her body to lie in honor in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda. The House of Representatives approved the resolution on October 28.
Since the founding of the practice of lying in state in the Rotunda in
1852, Parks was the 31st person, the first woman, the first American
who had not been a U.S. government official, and the second
non-government official (after Frenchman Pierre L'Enfant). She was also the second black person to lie in honor, after Jacob Chestnut, one of the two United States Capitol Police officers who were fatally shot by Russell Eugene Weston Jr. on July 24, 1998. Former President Gerald Ford was the last person to lie in state in the Rotunda, in 2007.
On October 30, President George W. Bush issued a Proclamation ordering that all flags on US public areas both within the country and abroad be flown at half-staff on the day of Parks' funeral.
The No. 2857 (GM serial number 1132, coach ID #2857) bus, which Rosa
Parks was riding on before she was arrested, is now a museum exhibit at
the
Henry Ford Museum.
Metro Transit in King County, Washington placed stickers[21]
dedicating the first forward-facing seat of all its buses in Parks'
memory shortly after her death, and the American Public Transportation
Association declared December 1, 2005, the 50th anniversary of her
arrest, to be a "National Transit Tribute to Rosa Parks Day". [22]
On that anniversary, President George W. Bush signed H. R. 4145,
directing that a statue of Parks be placed in the United States
Capitol's National Statuary Hall. In signing the resolution directing the Joint Commission on the Library to do so, the President stated:
| “ |
By placing her statue in
the heart of the nation's Capitol, we commemorate her work for a more
perfect union, and we commit ourselves to continue to struggle for
justice for every American. [23] |
” |
On February 5, 2006, at Super Bowl XL, played at Detroit's Ford Field, the late Coretta Scott King
and Parks, who had been a long-time resident of "The Motor City", were
remembered and honored by a moment of silence. It was noted that the
honor was to show respect for two women who had "helped make the nation
as a whole great." This Super Bowl was dedicated to their memory.
In the Los Angeles County MetroRail system, the Imperial/Wilmington station, where the Blue Line connects with the Green Line, has been officially named the "Rosa Parks Station."
Have An AMAZING MONTH-
Aaron and Kathy
simikathy.com