In her later years, Parks said 26-year-old King was picked because he was a newcomer to Montgomery and didn’t have any enemies in the community.
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Although most younger people today probably learned something about this history in school, it’s still shocking to think that there was a time in the living memory of many Americans when the treatment Rosa Parks received on that bus was both legal and “normal”. Her defiance sparked the push for racial equality, which brought civil rights superstars such as Martin Luther King Jr into the public eye, and changed the world forever.
“Our work isn’t finished”, she said.
Several prominent lawyers, politicians and activists spoke before Clinton, including Fred D. Gray, who was Parks’ lawyer six decades ago. The state’s conservative fiscal climate makes it hard to raise money, he said. “She was not born into wealth or power”, Mr. Obama said.
Although Parks is widely known, she actually wasn’t the first to refuse to give up her seat in Montgomery. Clinton called for criminal justice reforms and an end to the “era of mass incarceration in America”. She and 89 others were indicted on an old anti-boycott law. Compared with 2008, this time around Clinton has put much more emphasis on identity politics, meeting with Black Lives Matter organizers and emphasizing the idea of putting a woman in the White House more than ever. “And many police departments are deploying creative and effective strategies demonstrating how we can protect the public without resorting to unnecessary force”. Black leaders had been looking for a good test case to challenge the racist bus laws, but they couldn’t find a good central figure for the story – a teenage girl who had done the same as Parks a few months earlier was dismissed because she was unmarried and pregnant. He earned her a standing ovation inside the church as he called “the next president of the United States of America”.
“While reserving a seat on each bus in her name may seem like a small gesture”, noted Bassett,”it recognizes the important contribution this courageous woman made so that people of all colors could be treated with dignity, respect and empathy”. He was on a mission, he said, “to find everything segregated and destroy it”.
Kruize says, “Teach students at Rosa Parks that what you are doing every day is setting an example for people around you and what are you doing to be a leader”. Colvin was only 15.
Martin Luther King wrote “Actually, no one can understand the action of Ms Parks unless they realise that eventually the cup of endurance runs over, and the human personality cries out, ‘I can take it no longer'”.
“People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was exhausted, but that isn’t true”, said Parks, who died in 2005.
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King’s daughter, the Rev. Bernice King, gave the benediction at today’s program.
