Civil Rights Pioneer Rosa Parks Dead at Age 92

[4th and Long]

Civil Rights Pioneer Rosa Parks Dead at Age 92
Refusal to Give Up Bus Seat to a White Man Sparked Civil Rights Movement

Oct. 24, 2005 — Civil-rights pioneer Rosa Parks died today at age 92.

Called "the mother of the civil rights movement," Parks' refusal to give up a seat on a Montgomery, Ala., bus to a white person in the segregated South is thought to be the beginning of the public fight for equal rights.



She was arrested and fined for violating a city ordinance, but her act of defiance began a movement that ended legal segregation in America, and made her an inspiration to millions. A massive bus boycott that lasted a little over a year put the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., a then-unknown 26-year-old, into the national spotlight for the first time.

Rosa Parks was born Rosa Louise McCauley in Tuskegee, Ala., to James McCauley, a carpenter, and Leona McCauley, a teacher, on Feb. 4, 1913. At the age of 2, she moved to her grandparents' farm in Pine Level, Ala., with her mother and younger brother, Sylvester. Parks' father, James, headed North and was rarely heard from.

"My mother taught me self-respect," Parks later recalled. "There's no law that says people have to suffer."

She was educated at home by her mother, a school teacher, until the age of 11, when her family moved back to Montgomery and Parks enrolled in the Montgomery Industrial School for Girls, an all-black private school. Parks performed janitorial work in exchange for tuition.

At 19, she met and married barber Raymond Parks. He was 10 years her senior and a passionate civil rights activist. In her first autobiography, "Rosa Parks: My Story," she recalled what had impressed her the most about Raymond: "He didn't seem to have that meek attitude — what we called an 'Uncle Tom' attitude — toward white people." Articulate and bold, though with little formal education, it was he who encouraged her to complete her high school education at age 21.

Civil Rights Pioneer

Contrary to the public conception of a quiet, domestic woman who was just too tired from a hard day's work to get up from her seat, Parks was actually a strong civil rights advocate who worked as the secretary in the Montgomery office of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

In his biography of Parks, Douglas Brinkley wrote, "While the NAACP executives made dinner speeches and attended national conferences, [Parks] balanced the ledgers, kept the books, and recorded every report of racial discrimination that crossed her desk. She also did field research, traveling from towns like Union Springs to cities like Selma to interview African Americans with legal complaints, including some who had witnessed the murders of blacks by whites in rural areas."

In "Quiet Strength: The Faith, the Hope, and the Heart of a Woman Who Changed a Nation," a later autobiography, Parks said she wanted to be known as "a person who is concerned about freedom and equality and justice and prosperity for all people."

In 1955, the year of the famous bus incident near the intersection of Montgomery and Moulton streets, Parks was 42 years old. She denies that she remained seated because she was tired. "The only tired I was, was tired of giving in," she said.

Like other blacks who rode the bus, Parks was forced to abide by the law that reserved the first 10 seats for whites and mandated that blacks give up their own seats if necessary to accommodate white passengers. Black riders also had to enter the bus by the back door; on one occasion in 1943, Parks was ejected from the bus for failing to do so.

On Dec. 1, 1955, Parks was sitting with three others at the front of the black section of a bus when a white man boarded. As there were no seats available in the white section, the driver told Parks and the others in her row to move. Initially, no one complied, but the other passengers vacated their seats when the driver insisted they not make trouble for themselves. Parks, however, remained seated even after the driver threatened to call the police to force her to move.

"Go ahead and call them," she told the driver and waited patiently until the police arrived.

They arrested Parks and took her to jail. As Parks explained in her autobiography, she did not intend to change history that December evening. "If I had been paying attention, I wouldn't even have gotten on the bus."

The photograph taken of Parks during her fingerprinting eventually found its way into history books. She was granted one telephone call, and she used it to contact E.D. Nixon, a prominent member of Montgomery's NAACP chapter. Nixon was properly outraged, but he also sensed that in Parks his community might have the perfect individual to serve as a symbol of racial injustice. Nixon called a liberal white lawyer, Clifford Durr, who agreed to represent Parks. After consulting with the attorney, her husband, and her mother, Parks agreed to undertake a court challenge of the segregationist law that had led to her arrest.

The Famous Montgomery Bus Boycott

Word of her arrest quickly spread and leaflets urging a bus boycott followed. The 13-month boycott, which began Dec. 5 and was organized out of King's Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, overwhelmed Montgomery. It eventually took the U.S. Supreme Court to end the boycott. On Nov. 13, 1956, the court declared that Alabama's state and local laws requiring segregation on buses were illegal. On Dec. 20, federal injunctions were served on the city and bus company officials forcing them to follow the ruling.

The following morning, Dec, 21, 1956, King and the Rev. Glen Smiley, a white minister, shared the front seat of a public bus. The boycott had lasted 381 days.

"My real reason (for not getting out of her seat) was that I didn't think that I should have to stand up on order of this bus driver and be deprived of my seat," Parks told Ebony magazine. "I figured that as long as we did take that kind of treatment, they, the white segregationists, were becoming even more overbearing and cruel in their way of treating us."

Parks attributed her rebellious spirit to her grandfather, Sylvester Edwards, who, she said, was hostile toward whites because of the cruel treatment he had received from them. "While I do not think that I inherited his hostility," she mused, "my mother and I both learned from him not to let anyone mistreat us. It was passed down almost in our genes."

"I remember going to sleep as a girl hearing the Klan ride at night and hearing a lynching and being afraid the house would burn down," Parks said. In the same interview, she cited her lifelong acquaintance with fear as the reason for her relative fearlessness in deciding to appeal her conviction during the bus boycott. "I didn't have any special fear," she said. "It was more of a relief to know that I wasn't alone."

In 1957, Parks and her husband moved to Detroit, where she served on the staff of Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich. The Southern Christian Leadership Council established an annual Rosa Parks Freedom Award in her honor.

After the death of her husband, Parks founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development. The institute sponsors an annual summer program for teenagers called Pathways to Freedom. The young people tour the country in buses, under adult supervision, learning the history of their country and of the civil rights movement.

"I do the very best I can to look upon life with optimism and hope and looking forward to a better day, but I don't think there is anything such as complete happiness," she said in an interview. "It pains me that there is still a lot of Klan activity and racism. I think when you say you're happy, you have everything that you need and everything that you want, and nothing more to wish for. I haven't reached that stage yet."

Parks suffered from dementia since 2002. She was rarely seen in public after 2001 even though a very public lawsuit was filed in her name against the rap group OutKast over their song, "Rosa Parks."

An April 2005 settlement ended the 1999 lawsuit against OutKast. The amount of the settlement was not disclosed. Under the terms of the settlement, Parks was to receive money to be used for her care and to pay bills.

As part of the settlement, Sony BMG, OutKast, Arista Records, LaFace Records, and the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute will become partners in developing educational programs for youths that emphasize the role Parks played "in making America a better place for all races," according to a statement from Archer's law office.

[CosmicPal]

Originally Posted by 4th and Long

I've seen some classy posts on this thread. I've also seem some pretty classless posts on this thread. Interesting.

Here's a little history lesson kids. We're all from the same race. I know that's hard to swallow for some of you but it's a scientific fact. Here's a little quiz.

What race are you?

If you answered, Caucasian, African American, black, Hispanic, Oriental, or any other flavor, you're wrong. Dead wrong.

We're all from the same race.

The HUMAN RACE.

Peace. Out.

That was beautiful, man.



That's not only me clapping for you, that's the human race all clapping....

[4th and Long]

Thanks Cosmic, much appreciated, but unfortunately, the entire human race isn't clapping. If they were, my post would be redundant and racial intolerance would not exist.

[CosmicPal]

Originally Posted by 4th and Long

Thanks Cosmic, much appreciated, but unfortunately, the entire human race isn't clapping. If they were, my post would be redundant and racial intolerance would not exist.

True, but you have to understand that we will never be able to completely remove racial intolerance- even in a completely liberated and peaceful world, there will be some minor racial intolerance.

We CAN however relax racial tensions by a whole lot more understanding. Ignorance is the biggest bigot of all.

[4th and Long]

Originally Posted by CosmicPal

True, but you have to understand that we will never be able to completely remove racial intolerance- even in a completely liberated and peaceful world, there will be some minor racial intolerance.

We CAN however relax racial tensions by a whole lot more understanding. Ignorance is the biggest bigot of all.

No one with a brain in their head would attempt to argue your point.

Kudos, brother. Kudos.

[Bowser]

Originally Posted by 4th and Long

No one with a brain in their head would attempt to argue your point.

Kudos, brother. Kudos.

You're still a cracker.

[4th and Long]

Originally Posted by Bowser

You're still a cracker.

I know dats right, homeslice.

*sigh* I'm so white, I'm damn near transparent.

[Skip Towne]

Originally Posted by Rain Man

I don't think that sharing something I read necessarily makes me a racist.

Nonetheless, your broad-reaching allegations about me burning crosses and lynching innocent people in my role as Grand Imperial Wizard impelled me to do more research to clear my good name, and I came up with this information about Claudette Colvin, who was arrested several months before Parks.

In other articles, Parks says that it was an impromptu thing. I was mis-remembering about the planned part, I guess, mixing it up with the fact that the leaders were choosing to wait until "the right person" came along. Nonetheless, it's a bit of a coincidence that "the right person" was a longtime employee of the NAACP office.

I'm not saying it would have been a bad thing to stage it, either. It would have actually been pretty smart to do so, in my opinion.

http://inquirer.stanford.edu/Fall2004/vdlt/Unsung.html

It was March 2, 1955. Colvin was a junior at Booker T. Washington High School. She hoped to practice law one day and defend people like Jeremiah Reeves, a black classmate who had been convicted of raping a white woman and sentenced to death. The case had her simmering. It was on her mind that bus ride, she explains. And she was angry that twice a day she rode the same bus and here was the driver, ordering her to stand so a white person could sit.

What happened next was impulsive, Colvin says. “I had the spirit of Sojourner Truth inside me, the spirit of Harriet Tubman, telling me, ‘Don’t get up!’” She told a policeman that she was “just as good as any white person” and wasn’t going to give up her seat.

“I was very hurt because I didn't know that white people would act like that and I was crying,” Colvin later testified in court. “And (the policeman) said, ‘I will have to take you off.’ So I didn’t move. I didn’t move at all … So he kicked me and one got on one side of me and one got the other arm and they just drug me out.”

The police said Colvin was “clawing and scratching” as they hauled her off the bus. What Colvin has admitted is screaming again and again, “It’s my constitutional right.” She had paid her bus fare.

Colvin was charged with misconduct, resisting arrest and violating city and state segregation laws. (Eventually she was convicted and sentenced to probation.)

E.D. Nixon, then a leader of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP, had been waiting for a test case to challenge bus segregation and vowed to help Colvin after her father posted bail. But then came the second-guessing: Colvin’s father mowed lawns; her mother was a maid. Churchgoing people, but they lived in King Hill, the poorest section of Montgomery. The police, who took her to the city hall and then jail, also accused the teenager of spewing curse words, which Colvin denied, saying that in fact the obscenities were leveled at her (“The intimidation, the ridicule,” she often says now).

Some blacks believed she was too young, and too dark-skinned to be an effective symbol of injustice for the rest of the nation. Then, as local civil rights leaders continued to debate whether her case was worth contesting, that summer came the news that Colvin was pregnant — by a married man.

E.D. Nixon would later explain in an oral history, “I had to be sure that I had somebody I could win with.” Rosa Parks, for a decade the NAACP secretary who took special interest in Colvin’s case, was “morally clean, reliable, nobody had nothing on her.”

On December 1, 1955, Parks would board a bus at the same stop as had Colvin, and go on to become the symbol Nixon had been seeking.

Racist! You're no son-in-law of mine.

[Rain Man]

Originally Posted by siberian khatru

Is it hard to copy and paste on a computer while wearing sheets and a pointy hood?

The hardest part is not ever typing the letters B, L, A, C, and K. I have a whites-only computer.

[greg63]

I too believe that it doesn't matter if it was staged or not. I personally believe that she was brave for the stand she took. However, having thus said, I also don't think that someone posting that they believe it was staged is necessarily trying to pass their opinion off as fact. It is simply voicing an opinion, which is what I we all have a civil right to do. JMHO.

[BigRedChief]

Honor typically reserved for presidents

http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/10/27/par....ap/index.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Black civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks would become the first woman to lie in honor in the Capitol Rotunda under resolutions considered Thursday by lawmakers.

[mike_b_284]

even if it was part of a plan (which seems likley) it was an important act that triggered one of the most important chain of events this coutry has seen in the last 100 years. More than that, it required HUGE freakin balls. Never know what those cracker dixie cops will lynch you for back then. If they would have known the impact it was going to have they probably would have done just that.

[Rausch]

www.apple.com

[BigRedChief]

Originally Posted by BigRedChief

Honor typically reserved for presidents

http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/10/27/par....ap/index.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Black civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks would become the first woman to lie in honor in the Capitol Rotunda under resolutions considered Thursday by lawmakers.
http://history.missouristate.edu/lwb...osa_parks2.jpg

No more "may". It's official.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Rosa Parks, the seamstress whose act of defiance on a public bus a half-century ago helped spark the civil rights movement, will join presidents and war heroes who have been honored in death with a public viewing in the Capitol Rotunda.
Parks, who died Monday in Detroit at age 92, also will be the first woman to lie in honor in the Rotunda, the vast circular room under the Capitol dome.
The House on Friday passed by voice vote a resolution allowing Parks to be honored in the Capitol on Sunday and Monday "so that the citizens of the United States may pay their last respects to this great American." The Senate approved the resolution Thursday night.