Clinton didn’t directly mention her presidential aspirations, but her message tracked closely with policies she has rolled out in the past, like ending “the era of mass incarceration in America”, addressing gun violence, and fighting for voting rights.
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What Parks refused to do that day was to move from the middle section of the bus where both blacks and whites were allowed to sit.
“We must keep in the legacy of those who have gone before and look at what we have yet to do”, Clinton told the crowd before joining hands with the civil rights leaders to sing “We Shall Overcome”.
“Rosa Parks (being fingerprinted), Negro seamstress, whose refusal to move to the back of a bus touched off the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama”. Dr. King organized the Montgomery Bus Boycott as a young pastor from this church basement in 1955.
Despite the civil rights victories of the following decades, Clinton said that “there are still too many Americans, especially African-Americans, whose experience of the justice system is not what it should be”.
But much of that seemed to be lost on Clinton’s critics on Twitter, some of whom accused Clinton of being culturally tone deaf with her use of the logo.
The list of speakers included National Bar Association President Benjamin Crump, who represented the families of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, U.S. Representative Terri Sewell, and former U.S. Secretary of State and Democratic Presidential contender Hillary Clinton.
To honor the 60th anniversary of Parks’s civil disobedience, Clinton spoke at a memorial service to be held at the Baptist church where Martin Luther King Jr. preached from 1954 to 1960.
Parks died in 2005 at age 92. Fifteen-year-old civil rights activist Claudette Colvin came before Parks in making news for being dragged off a bus and jailed for not giving up her seat, but she was pregnant at the time and the NAACP didn’t think she could get the support of conservatives to spark a movement. Today, Rosa Parks is an American hero, whose story is taught in schools across the nation. King’s daughter, Bernice King, gave the benediction.
Sixty years ago this week, on December 1, 1955, a mild-mannered lady named Rosa Louise McCauley Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus in Alabama.
Stringer was a 20-year-old student and a member of the church during the Bus Boycott. “But her lifetime of activism – and her singular moment of courage – continue to inspire us today”, Obama said.
“We must strengthen that most fundamental citizenship right, the right to vote”, she said. Flags were flown at half-staff, and more than 50,000 people made their way to the Capitol rotunda, where she lay in state.
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“Those of us who serve in politics or who want to lead our country have a special responsibility to bring Americans together, not pull us apart”, Clinton said. It had decided that Parks’ case would get tied up in the state court system and filed a separate suit on the behalf of four other women.
