Clinton’s speech falls on the anniversary of Rosa Parks’ Dec. 1, 1955 arrest for refusing to give her bus seat to a white passenger.
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Parks sat down on the bus on December 1, 1955, not knowing she would soon be known as “The Mother of the Civil Rights Movement”.
For over a year, African-Americans boycotted public transportation to protest Parks’ arrest and, in turn, segregation laws.
City bells will chime on the anniversary of Parks’ arrest and a new historic marker will be placed at her arrest site, near the transfer station where the large city blue buses lumber in and out.
Like so many giants of her age, Rosa Parks is no longer with us. “I got on it to go home”, Parks has said.
What is the biggest misconception about Rosa Parks? “If he wanted to kill me and rape a dead body”, Parks wrote, “he was welcome but he would have to kill me first”. The state statute authorizes bus companies to provide and enforce separate facilities for whites and Negroes. But on his first ride, he resisted the driver’s order. And I think what having to see what it took, having to see Rosa Parks and many other people continue for decades…I mean, Rosa Parks will continue to the end of her life fighting for racial justice, fighting for criminal justice, fighting for a more just foreign policy, fighting for real school desegregation, real change in the curriculum.
Less than a week later, a young, little-known pastor named Martin Luther King, Jr. led a citywide bus boycott. She refused and was subsequently arrested. “The only exhausted I was was exhausted of giving”.
Rosa found work as a secretary for U.S. Representative John Conyers.
Now that these documents and photographs are viewable to the public, hopefully the world can finally learn about the strong, out-spoken, civil rights activist – that called Malcolm X her personal hero – that Rosa Parks actually was, rather than the meek, passive, “tired”, woman that history tells about.
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A 37¢ stamp in the To Form A More Perfect Union set issued August 30, 2005, commemorates the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott (Scott 3937e).
