A crowd was slowly filling the church Tuesday morning. We must pay it forward. But Clinton, the current frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination, also marked the occasion with a special logo on her social media accounts. Her leading party challenger, Bernie Sanders, has struggled to win basic name recognition in the south.
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On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a segregated bus, an act of defiance that became a symbol for the civil rights movement.
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was in Alabama today to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Montgomery bus boycott.
Clinton’s keynote address was part of an anniversary celebration organized by the National Bar Association, the nation’s largest association of black attorneys.
Her arrest sparked the boycott, led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., a Montgomery pastor, and others.
Mary Hunter, 75, dressed in her finest clothes, drove to the capital from Pike Road, Alabama, and stood in line for four hours to enter the church. That evening, a new marker was unveiled where Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white passenger.
She said Parks was also a recruiter and trainer for the Fellowship of Reconcilliation, a rape investigator for the NAACP, and a home economics teacher.
Elzie’s comments touch on another difference between today’s movement and the 1955 movement: the role of the Black church. In a 1995 interview, she said she wasn’t angry about being asked to leave her seat, just resolute.
Before Clinton spoke, 85-year-old Fred Gray stepped to the pulpit.
The Democrat met in recent months with members of the “Black Lives Matter” protest movement, which has highlighted several incidents of unjustified use of deadly force by police against mainly unarmed African-Americans. He was on a mission, he said, “to find everything segregated and destroy it”. She served as secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP, and had prepared for her dramatic but nonviolent action defending workers’ rights and racial equality at the Highlander Folk School, a training center in Tennessee. “At least I can say I did see her and I’ve been in her presence”. “It was important to her that people understand the government and to understand their rights and the Constitution that people are still trying to flawless today”. “It’s about strengthening ties across society, between neighbors, colleagues, even among people with whom we profoundly disagree”, Clinton said.
Citing such issues as mass incarceration, voting rights and economic empowerment, Clinton said, “There are still too many ways in which our laws and our policies fall short of our ideals”.
She spoke of the need to stop what she called the “epidemic of gun violence”.
“The signs were there when I was growing up, colored only, white only”, said ASU’s President Gwendolyn Boyd.
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Crump has represented the families of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown.
