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October 2005 Vol. 7 No. 10 | Submit stories, articles, letters, essays, poetry here! |
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October 2005 Vol. 7 No. 10 | Submit stories, articles, letters, essays, poetry here! |
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10-24-05. Civil rights legend, Rosa Parks, passed away Monday at the age of 92. According to longtime friend and attorney, Gregory Reed, Parks died between 7 and 8 p.m. Karen Morgan, a spokeswoman for U.S. Representative John Conyers, a Michigan Democrat, states that Parks died at her home of natural causes. Parks' health had been in decline since the late 1990s, when she stopped giving interviews and had rare public appearances. She had been relying heavily on a wheelchair and suffered from dementia, which was revealed during two lawsuits filed on her behalf against the hip hop duo Outkast. At the age of 42, she made history in December 1, 1955 when she refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama. Since post-Civil War Reconstruction, Jim Crow Laws were enforced that segregated the races in buses, restaurants, and public places throughout the South; and kept African Americans out of jobs and neighborhoods in the North. Parks, a seamstress and active member of the local chapter of the NAACP, was jailed and fined $14. Two black Montgomery women had been arrested earlier that year on the same charge. Park's brave action inspired the civil rights movement. A
boycott that lasted 381 days and consisted of 50,000 people was
triggered, organized by Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., a young
preacher at the time. The bus boycott came one year after the
U.S. Supreme Court's landmark declaration that separate schools
for blacks and whites were unequal. Parks moved to Michigan in
1957, after threats and losing her job. |
In 1965, she joined the staff of U.S. Representative John Conyers, a Michigan Democrat. According to Conyers, "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. She was a real apostle of the non-violence movement . . . You treated her with deference because she was so quiet, so serene - just a very special person." She earned the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which is awarded to civilians who make outstanding contributions to American life (1996), and the Congressional Gold Medal (1999), the nation's top civilian honor. She was born Rosa Louise McCauley on February 4, 1913 in Tuskegee, Alabama. Parks's mother was a teacher at a church school; her father was a carpenter who left the family in search of work. Her great-grandfather was a white plantation owner; her great-grandmother was a slave housekeeper and seamstress. She married Raymond Parks, a barber, in 1932. In an interview with the Detroit Free Press in 1995, she pondered on what she would like her legacy to be: "I'd like people to say I'm a person who always wanted to be free and wanted it not only for myself; freedom for all human beings."
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