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-- Original Message -----
From: Ray Kumapayi <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tuesday, October 25, 2005 8:44 am
Subject: Civil Rights Icon Rosa Parks Dies At 92

> Civil rights icon Rosa Parks dies at 92
> Long known as the 'mother of the civil rights movement'
>
> Tuesday, October 25, 2005; Posted: 4:07 a.m. EDT (08:07 GMT)
>
>
> var clickExpire = "-1"; Rosa Parks earned the Presidential Medal
> of Freedom.
>
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>
> (CNN) -- Rosa Parks, whose act of civil disobedience in 1955
> inspired the modern civil rights movement, died Monday in Detroit,
> Michigan. She was 92.
>
>
>
> Parks' moment in history began in December 1955 when she refused
> to give up her seat on a bus to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama.
>
> Her arrest triggered a 381-day boycott of the bus system by blacks
> that was organized by a 26-year-old Baptist minister, the Rev.
> Martin Luther King Jr. (See video on an activist's life and times -
> - 2:52)
>
> The boycott led to a court ruling desegregating public
> transportation in Montgomery, but it wasn't until the 1964 Civil
> Rights Act that all public accommodations nationwide were
> desegregated.
> Facing regular threats and having lost her department store job
> because of her activism, Parks moved from Alabama to Detroit in
> 1957. She later joined the staff of U.S. Rep. John Conyers, a
> Michigan Democrat.
>
> Conyers, who first met Parks during the early days of the civil
> rights struggle, recalled Monday that she worked on his original
> congressional staff when he first was elected to the House of
> Representatives in 1964.
>
> "I think that she, as the mother of the new civil rights movement,
> has left an impact not just on the nation, but on the world," he
> told CNN in a telephone interview. "She was a real apostle of the
> nonviolence movement."
>
> He remembered her as someone who never raised her voice -- an
> eloquent voice of the civil rights movement.
>
> "You treated her with deference because she was so quiet, so
> serene -- just a very special person," he said, adding that "there
> was only one" Rosa Parks.
>
> Gregory Reed, a longtime friend and attorney, said Parks died
> between 7 p.m. and 8 p.m. of natural causes. He called Parks "a
> lady of great courage."
>
> Parks co-founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self
> Development to help young people pursue educational opportunities,
> get them registered to vote and work toward racial peace.
>
> "As long as there is unemployment, war, crime and all things that
> go to the infliction of man's inhumanity to man, regardless --
> there is much to be done, and people need to work together," she
> once said.
>
> Even into her 80s, she was active on the lecture circuit, speaking
> at civil rights groups and accepting awards, including the
> Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1996 and the Congressional Gold
> Medal in 1999.
>
> "This medal is encouragement for all of us to continue until all
> have rights," she said at the June 1999 ceremony for the latter medal.
>
> Parks was the subject of the documentary "Mighty Times: The Legacy
> of Rosa Parks," which received a 2002 Oscar nomination for best
> documentary short.
>
> In April, Parks and rap duo OutKast settled a lawsuit over the use
> of her name on a CD released in 1998. (Full story)
> Bus boycott
> She was born Rosa Louise McCauley in Tuskegee, Alabama, on
> February 4, 1913. Her marriage to Raymond Parks lasted from 1932
> until his death in 1977.
>
> Parks' father, James McCauley, was a carpenter, and her mother,
> Leona Edwards McCauley, a teacher.
>
> Before her arrest in 1955, Parks was active in the voter
> registration movement and with the National Association for the
> Advancement of Colored People, where she also worked as a
> secretary in 1943.
>
> At the time of her arrest, Parks was 42 and on her way home from
> work as a seamstress.
>
> She took a seat in the front of the black section of a city bus in
> Montgomery. The bus filled up and the bus driver demanded that she
> move so a white male passenger could have her seat.
>
> "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," she once said.
>
> 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: "I don't know, but the law's the law, and
> you're under arrest."
>
> She added, "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."
> Four days later, Parks was convicted of disorderly conduct and
> fined $14.
>
> That same day, a group of blacks founded the Montgomery
> Improvement Association and named King, the young pastor of Dexter
> Avenue Baptist Church, as its leader, and the bus boycott began.
>
> For the next 381 days, blacks -- who according to Time magazine
> had comprised two-thirds of Montgomery bus riders -- boycotted
> public transportation to protest Parks' arrest and in turn the
> city's Jim Crow segregation laws.
>
> Black people walked, rode taxis and used carpools in an effort
> that severely damaged the transit company's finances.
>
> The mass movement marked one of the largest and most successful
> challenges of segregation and helped catapult King to the
> forefront of the civil rights movement.
>
> The boycott ended on November 13, 1956, after the U.S. Supreme
> Court upheld a lower court ruling that Montgomery's segregated bus
> service was unconstitutional.
>
> Parks' act of defiance came one year after the Supreme Court's
> Brown v. Board of Education decision that led to the end of racial
> segregation in public schools. (Full story)
>
> U.S. Rep. John Lewis of Georgia, a Democrat, told CNN Monday he
> watched the 1955-56 Montgomery drama unfold as a teenager and it
> inspired him to get active in the civil rights movement.
>
> "It was so unbelievable that this woman -- this one woman -- had
> the courage to take a seat and refuse to get up and give it up to
> a white gentleman. By sitting down, she was standing up for all
> Americans," he said.
>
>
>
> ---------------------------------
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