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Rosa Parks is dead at age 92

Hero who inspired Ala. bus boycott

BY LEO STANDORA
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER



The mother of America's civil rights movement died last night.
Rosa Lee Parks, who inspired an entire race to stand up for its rights by refusing in 1955 to give up her bus seat to a white man in Alabama, was 92.

"She just fell asleep and didn't wake up," said Shirley Kaigler, Parks' lawyer. She said Parks died surrounded by a small group of friends and family members at her Detroit home.

New York civil rights activist the Rev. Al Sharpton called for a national day of mourning.

"She was a historic American figure who literally opened up America for all citizens," he told the Daily News.

"I call on President Bush to fly flags at half-mast to memorialize the woman who made America a greater and better place."

Rep. Charles Rangel (D-Harlem) said, "There is a little bit of Rosa Parks in all of us.

"America was ready to reject the racism and terrorism that existed in the South," Rangel said of her brave refusal to move.

"Her standing up and refusing to go to the back of the bus helped us recognize how wrong it was to have segregation in this country. She sparked the conscience of America."

Parks, a mild-mannered daughter of a teacher and a carpenter, was 42 when she committed the act of defiance that changed the course of American history and earned her the title of "midwife" or "mother" of the civil rights movement.

At that time, Jim Crow laws in place since the post-Civil War Reconstruction required separation of the races in buses, restaurants and public accommodations throughout the South, while racial discrimination kept blacks out of many jobs and neighborhoods in the North.

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.

Parks refused and she was jailed and later fined $14.

But her one-woman act of defiance inspired 50,000 blacks inMontgomery to join in a historic 381-day boycott, organized then by a little-known Baptist minister, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

So they walked, finally refusing to endure their daily humiliation on the city's buses.

Parks' bravery became the catalyst for a movement that broke the back of legalized segregation in the U.S.

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."

"At the time I was arrested I had no idea it would turn into this," Parks said in 1992. "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."

The 1956 Montgomery bus boycott, which came two years after the Supreme Court's landmark declaration that separate schools for blacks and whites were "inherently unequal," marked the start of the modern civil rights movement.

It culminated in the 1964 federal Civil Rights Act, which banned racial discrimination in public accommodations.

Still, 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.

She worked as an aide to Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) from 1965 until retiring in 1988. Raymond Parks died in 1977.

Parks said upon retiring from her job with Conyers that she wanted to devote more time to the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development, which she founded in 1987 to develop young leaders.

She worried that young people take legal equality for granted and said that older blacks "have tried to shield young people from what we have suffered. And in so doing, we seem to have a more complacent attitude."

"We must double and redouble our efforts to try to say to our youth, to try to give them an inspiration, an incentive and the will to study our heritage and to know what it means to be black in America today," she said.

Parks' health had been declining for the past 10 years. She was said to be suffering dementia and had stopped making public appearances.

In one of her last lengthy interviews, she spoke to the Detroit Free Press in 1995 about what she would like people to say about her after she passed away.

She said the love of freedom was instilled in her from childhood by her grandfather - her mother's father with whom she lived when she was growing up.

He taught his children and grandchildren not to put up with mistreatment.

"It was passed down almost in our genes," Parks wrote in her 1992 autobiography, "My Story."

She recalled that when her grandfather was home, he kept a shotgun by his side in case the Ku Klux Klan dropped by.

"I'd like people to say I'm a person who always wanted to be free and wanted it not only for myself; freedom is for all human beings," she told the Free Press.


With Kerry Burke and News Wire Services

Tough Old Man

Another One Bites The Dust

TJ Cline

She was hand picked for that event in History.....and gets way too much credit
I think about all the hundreds or thousands who did more and were ignored by history....what a shame.

Dale Mabry

I let black women sit down instead of me everyday on the train, I can only hope that I will be memorialized in a way similar to Rosa. If not...well that's just racist.

Sad that she died though, but it is sad when anyone dies, save for the pervs and murderers.

If sense were common, everyone would have it.

4/2007-Current 75th Ranked most popular image 1 spot behind Prince's bulge...

kbm8795

They won't because you make the white women stand up, the Asian women massage your feet, the Hispanic women fetch your morning Taco Bell and the Native American women cook your breakfast Maypo.

Dale Mabry

If anything the Native American women would be fetching me peyote or making sweet necklaces. And, please, I prefer they be referred to as "My Squaws".

If sense were common, everyone would have it.

4/2007-Current 75th Ranked most popular image 1 spot behind Prince's bulge...

lnvanry

do you know that she sued OUTKAST for using her name....and settled for a handsome some of money w/ OUTKAST being forced to educated people about her story

so much for modesty

BigDyl

This negates her legacy entirely.

Total ownage.

gococksDJS

Dale, you have already been immortalized as being the first man to sit down.............................................. ............................................
.................................................. ...............................on 4 dongs at once. I mean your screen name Dale "Did I say 3? Better make it 4" Hammer has already reached iconic status, and when you go for penta-tration next month, there will be no stopping you.

musclepump

Hand picked for that event?

Let's all join together and SPEAK ENGLISH IN AMERICA.

TJ Cline

Yes..........
Their were several women before her that did the same thing but they were not of the character or image that the leadership wanted as a poster child..
Its a common fact................read up on your Black History

The Monkey Man

Kwame Kilpatrick (mayor of detroit) tried to jump on the Rosa's dead bandwagon...

He told this story about how he read about her when he was 10, then his mother took him to meet her, when he learned she lived in Detroit...

What 10 year old is going to research information like that, and ask his parents, if he can go meet an old lady???

(BULLSHIT)

He is up for re-election

Have Problems?... Chances are its due to overpopulation
Save The Oceans, Save the Planet, Save Your Family, Save Yourself!

gococksDJS

Have you read up on your white history???

TJ Cline

99.9% of the History they taught us in Catholic and Public school was all about the White man

Mudge

Heroes, are those who stand for what they believe in.

Kinesiology Comp Bench
MaxCalc Motivation Bench form Charles Poliquin
When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be. Lao-Tzu

Mudge

Maybe, she just happened to be the right person at the right time. Others did the same before her, but didn't have clean records like she did, so there was no 'movement' that could have been supported as vehemently.

Her name is just a figurehead, it could have been almost anyone else at that same time, if they would have stood their ground like her. I dont think she at anytime said "bow before me bitches, I freed youz."

Its not about credit, but she is simply a part of history.

Offshooting from this event, Martin Luther King Jr. came into being to do "his calling." Does he get too much credit too? He was just a man who did what he did.

Kinesiology Comp Bench
MaxCalc Motivation Bench form Charles Poliquin
When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be. Lao-Tzu

MyK

that can't be right! black are the ones with the superior genetics!

god hand

Not surprisingly cfs3 father was the one driving the bus

DOMS

And your father was sitting at the back of the bus, displayed less balls than Rosa Parks.

juggernaut2005

RIP Mrs Parks and Thank you!

"A bodybuilder once told me crack is good for cutting"

TJ Cline

Instant classic