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The Mother of the Civil Rights Movement, Rosa Parks, whose actions sparked a movement that changed the face of our nation passed away at the age of 92 on Monday, October 24, 2005, in Detroit, Michigan.
| On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat in the front of a bus to a white man and move to the back. Mrs. Parks, a seamstress in Montgomery, Alabama, states that she wasn’t exhausted from a day of work as it was widely reported. “The only tired I was, was tired of giving in,” she said — tired of the degradation and unjust treatment that African-Americans were subjected to daily. |
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“Our mistreatment was just not right, and I was tired of it,” Mrs. Parks wrote in her book, Quiet Strength: The Hope and the Heart of a Woman Who Changed a Nation. “I kept thinking about my mother and my grandparents, and how strong they were. 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 defiance sparked the famed 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott. The boycott, led by Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., lasted more than a year and opened the door for anti-segregation legislation and a Supreme Court ruling to ban segregation on public transportation. By December 1956, the buses in Montgomery were officially desegregated.
Not the accidental activist, Mrs. Parks had been active in the movement for change for some time. She was secretary of the local chapter of the NAACP for 12 years before her noted arrest. And rarely is it mentioned that Mrs. Parks’ most noted bus ride was not her first act of defiance on a Montgomery bus. During the 1940s she refused several times to abide with segregation policies while riding the bus. Coincidentally, the same bus driver who had her arrested in 1955 had ejected her from his bus a decade earlier for not complying with orders to move to the back of the bus. Also during the 1940s, Mrs. Parks organized the NAACP Youth Council and its members also defiantly rode in the front seats of buses.
Unable to find employment in Montgomery because of the boycott, Rosa and her husband Raymond moved to Detroit. While continuing to work for the NAACP, she was hired as office manager for U.S. Congressman John Conyers, Jr.’s Detroit office in 1965. In 1987, Mrs. Parks created The Rosa and Raymond Institute for Self-Development, an organization to motivate multicultural youth to reach their highest potential by using her philosophy of Quiet Strength and to also provide them with a cross-cultural exposure for nurturing a global and inclusive perspective.
Numerous honors have been bestowed upon Mrs. Parks including dozens of honorary doctorates from universities around the world, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Award and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1996. She was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1998 and awarded the Congressional Gold Medal of Honor — the highest award given by the United States government — in 1999.
Rosa Parks, a modest, and peaceful woman, was one of the greatest civil rights leaders in the United States. One way to remember her courage is to follow her example: “to bring peace, justice, equality, love and a fulfillment of what our lives should be. Without vision,” she told us, “the people will perish, and without courage and inspiration, dreams will die — the dream of freedom and peace.”
We honor her memory by redoubling our efforts in the fight for social and economic justice.
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CIVIL AND HUMAN RIGHTS
