Civil rights icon Rosa Parks dies

Tuesday, October 25, 2005

TOM GORDON

News staff writer

Rosa Louise Parks, whose soft-spoken refusal to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus launched the civil rights movement that dramatically changed Alabama and the nation, died Monday at age 92.

The Tuskegee native, who in 1999 received the nation's highest civilian award, the Congressional Gold Medal, died in Detroit, where she had lived since 1957. Mrs. Parks died at home of natural causes, said Karen Morgan, a spokeswoman for Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich.

Over the years, Mrs. Parks spoke to scores of student, civic and church groups, gave dozens of interviews, received countless awards and saw streets, schools and rap and pop songs named after her. In 1999, Time Magazine named her as one of the 100 most important people of the 20th century. She even has an entry in an edition of "Bartlett's Familiar Quotations," 13 pages away from the infamous "Segregation now" remarks in former Gov. George Wallace's 1963 inauguration speech.

But Mrs. Parks was not a prominent civil rights leader and never sought to be one. During the era in which she was in the spotlight, there were other key events - such as the U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 Brown decision outlawing public school segregation - that helped start the drive to overturn the pervasive discrimination besetting black Americans.

Also, long before Mrs. Parks' arrest, black leaders in Montgomery had been looking for the opportunity to launch a boycott. But women who had faced the same mistreatment that Mrs. Parks had faced were not deemed to be suitable candidates around whom to organize a protest.

Still, historians and analysts consider Mrs. Parks' quiet act of defiance on Dec. 1, 1955, to be the civil rights movement's major catalyst. It led to a highly effective mass protest and a successful court challenge of Alabama segregation laws. And, in Alabama and elsewhere, it gave blacks additional confidence that the system could be changed. It also led to the emergence of the civil rights movement's most influential leader, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

At the time of her solitary protest, Mrs. Parks had been working as a tailor's assistant in the Montgomery Fair department store and would ride a city bus to and from her downtown job. For most of the time she rode the bus, black passengers had to sit in the back. Often, when they bought their tickets at the front of the bus, they were then obliged to step outside and board through a rear door. Once, Mrs. Parks said, she had been ordered off a bus for refusing to reboard it from the rear.

Whites, meanwhile, sat in the front of the bus and city law forbade blacks and whites from sitting alongside each other. If a white boarded and did not have a place to sit, the nearest black passengers would have to give up their seats so an entire row would open to the white passenger.

Strong convictions:

On the afternoon of Dec. 1, Mrs. Parks and three other black passengers were told to move to the back after whites had filled the front of the bus and a white man needed a seat. While the other three blacks in the row with Mrs. Parks moved to the back, she did not. Two police officers came to arrest her, and one asked her why she did not move.

"Why do you all push us around?" she replied.

Mrs. Rosa Parks being booked following arrest for refusing to give up seat on bus.

"I was thinking that the only way to let them know I felt I was being mistreated was to do just what I did - resist the order," Mrs. Parks recalled years later. "I had not thought about it and I had taken no previous resolution until it happened, and then I simply decided that I would not get up.

"I was tired, but I was usually tired at the end of the day, and I was not feeling well, but then there had been many days when I had not felt well. I had felt for a long time that if I was ever told to get up so a white person could sit, that I would refuse to do so."

To white authorities in Montgomery, Mrs. Parks may have been just another anonymous black face, but she was well known in the black community and had a quiet but firm desire to change and challenge the system that had shortchanged her people in so many ways. She had registered to vote after three tries and worked as a secretary of the local chapter of the NAACP, collecting evidence of discrimination and questionable criminal cases against blacks around the state.

As an adviser to the local chapter's youth council, she had been part of an effort in which black schoolchildren sought to check out books at Montgomery's segregated main library.

Her father was not a factor in her young life and her mother, Leona McCauley, spent time away from home teaching school. Young Rosa spent much of her youth with her maternal grandparents in Pine Level in Montgomery County. Nonetheless, her mother helped instill strong convictions in her daughter.

While teaching school in a one-room shack, Mrs. McCauley told Rosa that blacks deserved a lot better. As a child, Mrs. Parks also had run-ins with race-baiting white children but would not back down, even when one of their parents was watching.

"I was raised to be proud and it had worked for me to stand up aggressively for myself," she wrote in her 1992 memoir, "Rosa Parks: My Story."

Her husband, Raymond Parks, a Randolph County-born barber and NAACP member whom she married in 1932, had a similar attitude. At the time of their marriage, he was helping raise money for the Scottsboro Boys, nine black youths accused of raping two white women in a railroad boxcar the previous year.

Throughout the Parkses' years in Montgomery, the segregated seating on the buses was an ever-present irritant. In years past, leaders such as E.D. Nixon, head of the local NAACP chapter, and Jo Ann Robinson, head of the influential Women's Political Council to which Mrs. Parks belonged, had considered calling for boycotts after incidents on buses involving black female passengers. They decided to act after Mrs. Parks' arrest.

As Mrs. Robinson said later, "Mrs. Parks had the caliber of character we needed to get the city behind us."

`The time was right':

Southern historians Dan Carter and David Garrow both said fate figured prominently in the case of Mrs. Parks and the subsequent leadership role that King played in the 381-day boycott.

"They were figures who ... because of their happenstance presence and happenstance courage, happened to become individual symbols of something that was a very broad grass-roots movement rather than something initiated either by Mrs. Parks or Dr. King," Garrow said.

"I like to believe that she would have been the first to say that she didn't do anything any different really than dozens of other black men and women did," Carter said. "It was just one of those cases where lightning struck, the time was right, the circumstances were right."

Rosa Parks’ mug shot following arrest for refusing to give up seat on bus to a white man. Her bail was set at $17.00.

Mrs. Parks was fingerprinted and released on bond. Then she appeared in a segregated City Court and was fined $10 and $4 in court costs. The day of her trial, most blacks stopped using the Montgomery bus system, relying on their feet or on a coordinated community carpool system to do their shopping or get to work. That unprecedented protest lasted 14 months.

While it continued, a federal lawsuit was filed to challenge the city's bus segregation ordinance and the state's segregation laws, and a three-judge panel declared the laws unconstitutional. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the ruling, and a major wedge was driven in the wall of the segregated South.

"We completely developed the boycott around what she did. And we felt ... the least thing we could do was stay off the buses until we could go back on an integrated basis," said Fred Gray, a lawyer who represented Mrs. Parks after her arrest and filed the successful challenge to the segregation laws she had violated. "She was very tough, very resolute, very determined. But she did it in her fashion."

The local minister who emerged as the bus boycott's leader, Martin Luther King Jr., would found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. The SCLC and other organizations such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee would challenge segregation and discrimination throughout the South and beyond before King's assassination in 1968. Birmingham and Selma were the sites of two major SCLC campaigns in the 1960s.

Left Alabama:

As these campaigns unfolded, Mrs. Parks was no longer calling Alabama home. She had lost her job in 1956 when the Montgomery Fair department store closed its tailor shop, and she and her husband moved to Detroit in 1957. Her brother Sylvester had moved there years before.

She remained much in demand as a speaker, and was on hand for some of the movement's major events, such as the 1963 march on Washington and the last leg of the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march. In 1965, she went to work for a freshman congressman from Detroit named John Conyers and became his longtime office manager.

Her husband died in 1977, and she retired in September 1988, but continued to work to educate underprivileged youths through the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development. Mrs. Parks became a revered figure in Detroit, where a street and middle school were named for her.

In the summer of 1988, speaking as a presidential contender at the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta, the Rev. Jesse Jackson noted the multiracial makeup of his audience and said, "All of us - all of us who are here think that we are seated. But we're really standing on someone's shoulders." Jackson then introduced Mrs. Parks to a thunderous ovation.

Two years later, after his plane touched down in Detroit, a newly freed Nelson Mandela chanted Mrs. Parks' name and hugged her when he saw her among the dignitaries waiting to greet him. A year later, a bust of Mrs. Parks was unveiled at the Smithsonian Institution.

And in December of 2000, Mrs. Parks, in a wheelchair, attended dedication ceremonies in Montgomery for a 40,000-square-foot library and museum that bears her name and stands at the site where she was arrested.

"Surely Mrs. Rosa Parks was sent to us by God, because few among us were so well prepared to play such a momentous role in history," said King's widow, Coretta.

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.

"There are still people ... that because of their human condition are looked down on, derided, degraded, demeaned, and we should all remember the powerful example of this one citizen," President Clinton said. "And those of us with greater authority and power should attempt every day, in every way, to follow her lead."

Mrs. Parks in later years of her life.

Mrs. Parks, who suffered from dementia in the final years of her life, only occasionally made news headlines then and sometimes it was in controversial circumstances.

In 1994, Mrs. Parks' home was invaded by a 28-year-old man who beat her and took $53.

She and the rap duo OutKast settled a lawsuit earlier this year in which she had accused the group of using her name in a song she considered offensive.

Two charities that Parks and her late husband had founded had been sued for $250,000 in unpaid bills by federal and Michigan officials, ad agencies and others. In 2002, after she fell nearly $5,000 behind in rent payments for her three-bedroom apartment, her then-landlord issued her an eviction notice. But later, under an arrangement with a new landlord, she was able to live rent free in her high-rise home.

Remembering Rosa Parks

Tuesday, October 25, 2005

Mrs. Rosa Parks, a genuine American hero.

"She was the epitome of freedom and what it meant and what it stood for. Because of Rosa Parks, we have what is considered freedom for all people throughout the world in terms of what she exemplified when she refused to give up her seat in 1955."

Southern Christian Leadership Conference President Charles Steele

"Rosa Parks was a heroine who single-handedly changed the landscape of the South. She proved by the power of example that one individual can move a community to action. She was also a modest woman who rose to her moment in history with dignity and grace."

U.S. Rep. Artur Davis, D-Birmingham, through spokesman

"The nation lost a courageous woman and a true American hero. A half century ago, Rosa Parks stood up not only for herself but for generations upon generations of Americans."

U.S. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., in a statement.

"A gentle woman whose single act changed the most powerful nation in the world. ... One of the highlights of my life was meeting and getting to know her."

Rev. Al Sharpton, civil rights activist and former presidential candidate

"She was very tough, very resolute, very determined. But she did it in her fashion."

Fred Gray, Tuskegee lawyer who represented Mrs. Parks

What Rosa Parks Gave America

John NicholsTue Oct 25,12:26 AM ET

The Nation -- In 1776, the Continental Congress awarded the first Congressional Gold Medal of Honor to General George Washington, a bold and determined man who had the courage to lead his country into battle for its freedom but who lacked the wisdom to recognize that the promise of the American Revolution would never be fully realized for so long as African Americans were second-class citizens.

In 1999, two hundred and twenty three years after Washington was recognized by the Continental Congress, its successor, the 106th Congress, voted overwhelmingly to award the same Congressional Gold Medal of Honor that had once been given to the man know as The Father of His Country to the woman who will forever be known as the Mother of the Civil Rights Movement.

Congressional Gold Medal of Honor

With her December 5, 1955, refusal to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, city bus to a white passenger, Rosa Parks triggered a boycott by African Americans of the municipal bus system that lasted more than a year and inspired the movement that forced the end of the officially-sanctioned segregation that had created an apartheid system in the American south.For that, and for her resolute commitment to carry on the struggle for social and economic justice throughout a long life of fighting discrimination based on race, class, sex and sexuality, Parks received many awards, all of them richly deserved.

But Parks, who died Monday at age 92, never needed those honors as much as America needed to bestow them.

And no recognition of Parks was more necessary than the awarding of that Congressional Gold Medal of Honor in 1999.

The American Revolution was not an event but rather a promise of freedom. That promise may have been made by a Virginia plantation owner and his white male compatriots. But it was realized by an African American seamstress from Montgomery, Alabama, who refused to believe that that promise did not apply to her.

President William Jefferson Clinton, who was named for the greatest of Washington's comrades in that struggle for freedom, and who presented the medal to Parks on June 15, 1999, gave voice to that reality when he explained to the crowd that gathered in the Capitol Rotunda to celebrate the honor that, "In so many ways Rosa Parks brought America home to our founders' dream."

It was not merely appropriate that Rosa Parks receive the same recognition as George Washington had been accorded. It was essential, for without Parks and those who joined her in forging the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, Washington's promise of freedom would have remained forever constricted by the overt chains of slavery and the covert chains of segregation

ROCHELLE RILEY: A tiny woman with a quiet voice delivered a message worldwide

BY ROCHELLE RILEY
FREE PRESS COLUMNIST

October 25, 2005

Anyone who thinks that Rosa Parks was a simple seamstress who just got tired one day better take another look at the history. A former secretary of the NAACP and adviser to the NAACP Youth Council, Parks had been evicted from buses before.

The fact that she was a tiny, soft-spoken but firm woman belied the effect she had on the battle for equality. She was no accidental activist. After years of being forced to give up seats for white passengers and to sit or stand in the back, civil rights activists in Montgomery decided that the time had come for change.

It came through Parks, who got the opportunity.

Her simple action on Dec.1, 1955 -- refusing to give in, to shuffle, to wearily accept that place lower than whites on a social ladder -- might have been her path to glory. But she wasn't after glory. She was after equality.

And her simple action was a reminder that revolutions begin in single moments.

Picture of bus that Rosa Parks was riding on when she refused to give up her seat and, in so doing, entered the pages of history.

"Our mistreatment was just not right, and I was tired of it," Parks wrote in her 1994 book "Quiet Strength."

"I kept thinking about my mother and my grandparents, and how strong they were," she wrote. "I knew there was a possibility of being mistreated, but an opportunity was being given to me to do what I had asked of others."

Her arrest and trial led to a 381-day bus boycott that led to the desegregation of buses and trains across the South. Her name became history when the Supreme Court ruled in 1956 that segregated transportation violated the U.S. Constitution.

So many laws violated the constitution in the 1940s and '50s that the Constitution itself lived as a shell of what the Founding Fathers had written.

It took a petite woman of 42 to remind America of what a roomful of men had signed.

As the mother of the civil rights movement, she set the tone for quiet refusal to accept the status quo and her action would pave the way for a nonviolent movement that would elevate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to status as icon. Parks was a complex woman who understood the plight of her race. She had more heart and courage and compassion for the circumstances that have led to the black condition in poor neighborhoods in cities across the country than other black people could admit then or now.

That compassion was evident in August 1994, after a would-be young thief attacked her in her own house. In a later account of the incident, she wrote "I pray for this young man and the conditions in our country that have made him this way."

I can't forget her concern for that young man. I love her ability to see the place that birthed his anger.

Rosa Parks helped change the world in a quiet moment nearly 50 years ago. But her revolution hasn't ended.

Her greatest legacy can be found in the minds of young teens who don't know the names Julian Bond and Andrew Young, who barely know Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman.

But they know Rosa Parks.

When my phone rang with the news of her death, my daughter ran for her radio.

"Mom, Rosa Parks is in the hospital."

"No, she's dead, honey."

My 16-year-old looked a little sad. "Mom, she was history," she said.

"And what does she mean to us?"

"Freedom."

Freedom has become such an all-encompassing word that covers an ideal greater for the whole than is greater than the one. But in the 1950s and '60s, black Americans counted their freedoms in the daily things they could not do because of the color of their skin: use the nearest bathroom, sit at a lunch counter, drink from a "white" water fountain, shop in a lovely store, attend a good school.

When Rosa Parks refused to stand, she actually stood for a shift in the movement, which rose to another level from that quiet moment.

Every warrior who fought for change, who struggled for all people to be treated the same, deserves a place in history, deserves to have their name remembered. Rosa Parks didn't find a place in history. She created one. She became that moment. Where have all our flowers gone? Where are the Rosa Parkses who can refuse continued bigotry and discrimination now?

As my daughter said of Mrs. Parks: "She was history."

What I want to know is: Who will make history now?