Rosa Parks: Difference between revisions

Rosa Parks

File:Rosaparksarrested.jpeg

Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white man.

File:Rparksmug1.jpg

Rosa Parks’s Police mugshot

Rosa Lee Parks (February 4, 1913–October 24, 2005) was an African American seamstress and figure in the American Civil Rights Movement, most famous for her refusal in 1955 to give up a bus seat to a white man when ordered to do so by the bus driver.

Early life

Rosa Parks was born as Rosa Lee McCauley in Tuskegee, Alabama, daughter of James and Leona McCauley. She grew up on a farm with her Methodist grandparents, mother, and brother. She worked as a seamstress making bed sheets.

In 1932, she married Raymond Parks, who was active in civil rights causes. In the 1940s, Mr. and Mrs. Parks were members of the Voters' League.

In December 1943, Parks became active in the American Civil Rights Movement and worked as a secretary for the Montgomery, Alabama branch of the NAACP. Of her position she said, "I was the only woman there, and they needed a secretary, and I was too timid to say no." She continued as secretary until 1957 when she left Montgomery. Just six months before her arrest, she had attended the Highlander Folk School, an education center for workers' rights and racial equality. Some accounts portray her as an individual with no particular political background or training.

Civil rights and legal context

Parks was not the first African American to refuse to give up her seat to a white person. The NAACP accepted and litigated other cases before, such as that of Irene Morgan, ten years earlier, which resulted in a victory in the Supreme Court on Commerce Clause grounds. That victory only overturned state segregation laws as applied to actual travel in interstate commerce, such as interstate bus travel. Black leaders had begun to build a case around a 15-year-old girl's arrest for refusing to relinquish her bus seat, and Mrs. Parks had been among those who were raising money for the girl's defense. However, when they learned that the girl was pregnant, they decided that she was an unsuitable symbol for their cause.

In 1944 Jackie Robinson took a similar, but lesser-known, stand with an Army officer in Fort Hood, Texas, refusing to move to the back of a bus. He was brought before a court martial, which acquitted him.[1] The NAACP had additionally considered but rejected some earlier protesters deemed unable or unsuitable to withstand the pressure of a legal challenge to segregation laws (see Claudette Colvin and Mary Louise Smith).

The bus and protests

See also: Montgomery Bus Boycott

Mrs. Parks boarded the Cleveland Avenue bus on December 1, 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama after a day at work. She was sitting in the 'colored' section of the bus. The 'colored' section of the buses in Montgomery was not fixed in size but determined by the placement of a movable sign. The driver could move the sign or even remove it altogether. Mrs. Parks initially sat behind the sign, but refused to move when the driver, James Blake, moved it behind her. Blake demanded that four blacks give up their seats in the middle section so a lone white man could sit. Three of them complied. When recalling the incident for Eyes on the Prize, a 1987 public television series on the civil rights movement, Parks said, " When he saw me still sitting, he asked if I was going to stand up and I said, 'No, I'm not'. And he said, 'Well, if you don't stand up, I'm going to have to call the police and have you arrested.' I said, 'You may do that.' "

Parks detailed her motivation in this moment in her autobiography, My Story:

People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.

She was arrested, tried, and convicted of disorderly conduct as well as of violating a local ordinance.

The following night, 50 leaders of the African American community, headed by the then relatively unknown minister Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr (pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama) gathered to discuss the proper actions to be taken as a result of Mrs. Parks’ arrest. While Irene Morgan, unwed and pregnant, was deemed unacceptable to be the center of a civil rights mobilization, Dr. King stated that, "Mrs. Parks, on the other hand, was regarded as one of the finest citizens of Montgomery — not one of the finest Negro citizens — but one of the finest citizens of Montgomery." The selection of Parks for a test case supported by the NAACP has been speculated to be in part because she was employed by the NAACP.

What ensued next was the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The entire black community boycotted public buses for 381 days. Dozens of public buses stood idle for months until the law requiring segregation on public buses was lifted. This event helped spark many other protests against segregation.

Through her role in initiating this boycott, Rosa Parks helped make other Americans aware of the civil rights struggle. Dr. King wrote in his 1958 book, Stride Toward Freedom, Mrs. Parks’ arrest was the precipitating factor rather than the cause of the protest. The cause lay deep in the record of similar injustices...Actually no one can understand the action of Mrs. Parks unless he realizes that eventually the cup of endurance runs over, and the human personality cries out, "I can take it no longer."

In 1956 Parks’ case ultimately resulted in United States Supreme Court's ruling that segregated bus service was unconstitutional. The Rosa Parks case is considered the landmark because it applied to all segregationist laws, not just those affecting interstate commerce.

Later life

The bus on which Rosa Parks was riding is now a museum exhibit at the Henry Ford Museum

After her arrest, Parks became an icon of the civil rights movement and suffered hardship as a result. She lost her job at the department store and her husband quit his after his boss forbade him from talking about Rosa or the legal case. Mrs. Parks traveled and spoke extensively to raise money for her legal fees. In August 1957, weary of phone death threats and fearing firebomb attacks on the homes of their supporters, she and her husband accepted the urging of family who feared for her safety and moved to Detroit, Michigan to live near her younger brother. In 1958 she moved to Hampton, Virginia, where she found a job as a hostess in an inn at Hampton Institute. However, there was not enough room for either her husband and mother to live with her and she moved back to Detroit and worked as a seamstress. She became a staff assistant to U. S. Representative John Conyers (D-Michigan) in 1965, a position she continued in until her retirement in 1988.

The Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development was co-founded in February 1987 by Mrs. Rosa Parks and Ms. Elaine Eason Steele in honor of Rosa's husband Raymond Parks. The institute runs "Pathways to Freedom" bus tours introducing young people to important civil rights and underground railroad sites throughout the country. In 1992 she published, Rosa Parks: My Story, an autobiography leading up to her decision not to give up her seat aimed at younger readers.

On August 30 1994, at age eighty one, Rosa Parks was attacked in her Detroit home by Joseph Skipper, who is also African American. The incident created outrage throughout America. Skipper was arrested and charged with various breaking and entering offenses against Parks and other neighborhood victims. He confessed to the crime and when recounting the sequence of events said he didn't know he was in Parks’s home but recognized her after entering. Skipper asked, "Hey, aren't you Rosa Parks?" and she replied "yes." She handed him $3 when he demanded money and an additional $50 when he demanded more. Before fleeing, Skipper struck Parks in the face.^[2] Skipper admitted guilt and on August 8, 1995 was sentenced to eight to fifteen years in prison.^[3]

In 1995, Parks published her memoirs Quiet Strength concentrating on the role her faith played in her life. On a 1997 trip, the Pathways to Freedom bus drove into a river killing Adisa Foluke, called Park's adopted grandson, who was a chaperone, and injuring several others. Parks served as a board member for the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

File:AdvertiserParksDies.jpg

October 25, 2005 edition of the Montgomery Advertiser after her death.

Last days

Rosa Parks resided in Detroit until she died at the age of 92 on October 24, 2005, at about 19:00 hours EDT, at her apartment in a nursing home on the east side. She was diagnosed with Progressive Dementia in 2004. She will lie in state October 29 and October 30 in Montgomery, Alabama. Her body will then return to Detroit to lie in state at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History on November 1. Her funeral will be held November 2 at the Greater Grace Temple and she will be buried between her husband and mother at the Woodlawn Cemetery in Detroit.

Lawsuits and controversy

In 1999 a lawsuit was filed on her behalf against the popular American hip hop duo OutKast and LaFace Records, claiming that the group had illegally used her name without her permission for their song "Rosa Parks", the most successful radio single of their 1998 album Aquemini.

In October 2004, U.S. District Judge George Caram Steeh appointed Dennis Archer, a former mayor of Detroit and Michigan Supreme Court justice, as guardian of legal matters for Parks after her family expressed concerns that her caretakers and her lawyers were pursuing the case based on their own financial interest.^[4] "My auntie would never, ever go to this length to hurt some young artists trying to make it in the world," Parks’s niece, Rhea McCauley, said in an Associated Press interview. "As a family, our fear is that during her last days Auntie Rosa will be surrounded by strangers trying to make money off of her name."^[5]

OutKast was dismissed from the suit in August 2004. Parks’ attorneys and caretaker refiled and named BMG, Arista Records and LaFace Records as the defendants along with Barnes & Noble and Borders Group for selling the songs, asking for $5 billion in damages. The lawsuit was settled on April 15, 2005. In the settlement agreement, OutKast and their producers and record labels paid Parks an undisclosed cash settlement, agreed to work with the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development in creating educational programs on the life of Rosa Parks. The record labels and OutKast addmitted to no wrongdoing. Whether Park's legal fees were paid for from her settlement money or by the record companies was not disclosed.^[6]

A scene in the 2002 film Barbershop, where characters discuss earlier instances of African-Americans refusing to give up their bus seats, caused activists Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton to launch a boycott against the film. The scene showed a barber arguing that many other African Americans before Parks had resisted giving up their seats; but because of her status as an NAACP secretary, she received undeserved fame.

Awards and honors

The Rosa Parks Congressional Gold Medal, bears the legend "Mother of the Modern Day Civil Rights Movement."

In 1979, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People awarded Parks the Spingarn Medal, its highest honor, and she received the Martin Luther King Sr. Award the next year. She was inducted into the Michigan Women's Hall of Fame in 1983 for her achievements in civil rights. However, given the pivotal role she had played in the nation's history, she had received few national accolades until very late in life. In 1990, she was called at the last moment to be part of the group welcoming South African President Nelson Mandela. Upon spotting her in the reception line, Mandela showed his own regard by chanting her name.

Parks received the Rosa Parks Peace Prize in 1994 in Stockholm, Sweden, followed by the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor given by the U.S. executive branch, in 1996. In 1998, she became the first awardee for the International Freedom Conductor Award given by the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center. The next year Parks was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest award given by the U.S. legislative branch, as well as the Detroit-Windsor International Freedom Festival Freedom Award. In 2000, her home state awarded her the Alabama Academy of Honor as well as the first Governor's Medal of Honor for Extraordinary Courage. Also, in 1999, Time magazine named Parks one of the top twenty most influential and iconic figures of the twentieth century. [7] She was also awarded two dozen honorary doctorates from universities worldwide and was made an honorary member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority.

The Rosa Parks Library and Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, was dedicated to her in November 2001. It is located on the corner where Parks boarded the famed bus. The most popular item in the museum is a sculpture of Parks sitting on a bus bench. The documentary "Mighty Times: The Legacy of Rosa Parks" received a 2002 nomination for Academy Award for Documentary Short Subject. That year she also collaborated in a TV movie of her life starring Angela Bassett.

Notes

• ^ "Assailant Recognized Rosa Parks", Detroit Free Press, September 3, 1994
• ^ "Man Gets Prison Term For Attack on Rosa Parks", San Francisco Chronicle, August 8, 1995
• ^ "'I understand I am a symbol, but I have never gotten used to being a public person'", Associated Press State & Local Wire, December 4, 2004
• ^ "Medical records show Rosa Parks had dementia as early as 2002", Associated Press State & Local Wire, January 13, 2005
• ^ "Parks settles OutKast lawsuit", Detroit News, April 15, 2005

References

• Editorial. 1974. "Two decades later." New York Times (May 17): 38. ("Within a year of Brown, Rosa Parks, a tired seamstress in Montgomery, Alabama, was, like Homer Plessy sixty years earlier, arrested for her refusal to move to the back of the bus.")

See also

• Racism of the Southern United States
• Montgomery bus boycott

External links

Multimedia and interviews

• Civil Rights Icon Rosa Parks Dies - National Public Radio
• Civil Rights Pioneer Rosa Parks 1913-2005 - Democracy Now! democracynow.org

Official

• The Rosa Parks Library and Museum at TSUM
• The Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development

Other

• Complete audio/video and newspaper archive of the Montgomery Bus Boycott
• Bruderhof Peacemakers Guide profile on Rosa Parks
• The mug shot of Rosa Parks after she was arrested in Montgomery
• Rosa Parks interview and photographs
• News of Parks’ Death from Reuters
• Rosa and Raymond Parks Marriage Profile