Rosa Parks 1913-2005

[Zaaphod]

An important person in the civil rights movement here in the U.S. has died. It's amazing what refusing to give up her seat on a bus led to.<br><br><!--QuoteBegin--> <table border='0' align='center' width='95%' ><tr><td class='quotetop'><b>Quote:</b> </td></tr><tr><td class='quotebody'> <span style='font-size:10pt;line-height:100%'><b>Civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks dies</b></span><br><br><br>Tuesday, October 25th, 2005<br>By: The Associated Press<br><br><br>DETROIT - Rosa Lee Parks, whose refusal to give up her bus seat to a white man sparked the modern civil rights movement, died Monday. She was 92.<br><br>Parks died at her home of natural causes, said Karen Morgan, a spokeswoman for U.S. Representative John Conyers (D-Mich.). Parks was 42 when she committed an act of defiance in 1955 that was to change the course of American history and earn her the title "mother of the civil rights movement."<br><br>At that time, laws in place since the post-Civil War Reconstruction 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 neighbourhoods in the North.<br><br>The Montgomery, Ala., seamstress, an active member of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, was riding on a city bus Dec. 1, 1955, when a white man demanded her seat.<br><br>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 Parks was jailed.<br><br>She also was fined $14.<br><br>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."<br><br>Her arrest triggered a 381-day boycott of the bus system organized by a then little-known Baptist minister, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who later earned the Nobel Peace Prize for his work.<br><br>"At the time I was arrested I had no idea it would turn into this," Parks said 30 years later.<br><br>"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."<br><br>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.<br><br>The movement culminated in the 1964 federal Civil Rights Act, which banned racial discrimination in public accommodations.<br><br>After taking her public stand for civil rights, Parks had trouble finding work in Alabama. Amid threats and harassment, she and her husband Raymond moved to Detroit in 1957.<br><br>She worked as an aide in Conyers' Detroit office from 1965 until retiring Sept. 30, 1988. Raymond Parks died in 1977.<br><br>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.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table> <!--QuoteEEnd-->

[Rooster]

Man, I remember learning about her in school. She will be missed...

[VisibilityMissing]

Thanks for putting this up, Zaaph. Somehow I missed that it was up here.<br><br>In related news, I've been following the reopening of the <a href='http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/till/' target='_blank'>Emmett Till</a> case.

[Zaaphod]

<!--QuoteBegin-VisibilityMissing+Nov 24 2005, 08:09 AM--> <table border='0' align='center' width='95%' ><tr><td class='quotetop'><b>Quote:</b> (VisibilityMissing @ Nov 24 2005, 08:09 AM)</td></tr><tr><td class='quotebody'> Thanks for putting this up, Zaaph. Somehow I missed that it was up here.<br><br>In related news, I've been following the reopening of the <a href='http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/till/' target='_blank'>Emmett Till</a> case. <!--QuoteEnd--> </td></tr></table> <!--QuoteEEnd--><br> I had endless trouble in the quote with forum-breaking extended characters. <!--emo&<_<--><img src='http://definecynical.mancubus.net/forum ... ns/dry.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='dry.gif' /><!--endemo--><br><br>As for Emmet Till, just another sad chapter in American race relations. Getting lynched for merely whistling at a white woman is beyond ridiculous.<br>