Gray is speaking at a two-day event organised by the National Bar Association to mark the occasion, which was headlined by a visit to Montgomery yesterday from Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Under the leadership of a charismatic, but previously unknown preacher named Martin Luther King Jr, the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) spearheaded the year-long boycott that captured the attention of the world and heaped pressure on the city’s white authorities to respond to black demands.
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Her comments came while she commemorated the 60th anniversary of Rosa Parks and the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama. In a 2010 book about mass incarceration, civil rights litigator Michelle Alexander characterized the USA prison system as “the new Jim Crow”.
Due to segregation laws, African Americans were required to not only sit in the back of the bus, but also to give up their seats to white passengers if the bus filled up.
The Rosa Parks Museum in Montgomery has complimentary admission for visitors today. Rosa Parks reminds us that there is always something we can do.
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”.
Rosa Parks’ legacy in civil rights history was the focal point of a variety of events in Montgomery on Tuesday. Even though the Klu Klux Klan did everything they could to run his family out of town, as he says, he just couldn’t turn his back on 50,000 people. She was determined to hear Clinton’s speech, she said, because a woman’s campaign for the presidency of the United States seemed like a civic bookend to Rosa Parks’s action 60 years earlier.
On how she wanted to be remembered:I’d only like for [historians] to say that I was a person who believed in the freedom and equality for all people, regardless of their race and color, regardless of whatever their religious beliefs may be. She counted as a personal hero Malcolm X, whose ethical standard that violence was sometimes necessary stands in stark contrast to the civil-rights movement’s historical reputation of nonviolent resistance. Today, although some Black churches remain engaged in the current Black Lives Matter movement, neither they nor their pastors serve as the primary organizers. Thousands of people walked everywhere they needed to go – sometimes for miles – rather than take municipal transportation.
This anniversary may be the last major one featuring those who participated in the year-long boycott, said Howard Robinson, an archivist and instructor at Alabama State University, which will host a discussion titled I Was There.
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But Rosa Parks was much more than someone who lived quietly until she hit a breaking point. “Let us rejoice and be glad in it”, she said – and crossed her arms to join hands with those on stage to sing Civil Rights era staple “We Shall Overcome” after her remarks.
