ROSA PARK HAS DIED!

"IN MEMORY OF A WOMAN WHO STOOD UP
FOR HER RIGHT- FREEDOM"


Rosa Parks is dead at age 92
Hero who inspired Ala. bus boycott
BY LEO STANDORA DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
The mother of America's civil rights movement died last night.
Rosa Lee Parks, who inspired an entire race to stand up for its
rights by refusing in 1955 to give up her bus seat to a white
man in Alabama, was 92.
"She just fell asleep and didn't wake up," said Shirley Kaigler,
Parks' lawyer. She said Parks died surrounded by a small
group of friends and family members at her Detroit home.
New York civil rights activist the Rev. Al Sharpton called
for a national day of mourning.
"She was a historic American figure who literally opened up
America for all citizens," he told the Daily News.
"I call on President Bush to fly flags at half-mast to memorialize
the woman who made America a greater and better place."
Rep. Charles Rangel (D-Harlem)
said, "There is a little bit of Rosa Parks in all of us.
"America was ready to reject the racism and terrorism that
existed in the South," Rangel said of her brave refusal to move.
"Her standing up and refusing to go to the back of the bus helped
us recognize how wrong it was to have segregation in this country.
She sparked the conscience of America."
Parks, a mild-mannered daughter of a teacher and a carpenter,
was 42 when she committed the act of defiance that changed
the course of American history and earned her the title
of "midwife" or "mother" of the civil rights movement.
At that time, Jim Crow laws in place since the post-Civil War
Reconstruction required separation of the races in buses, restaurants
and public accommodations throughout the South, while racial
discrimination kept blacks out of many jobs and neighborhoods
in the North.
The Montgomery, Ala., seamstress, an active member of the
local chapter of the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People, was riding on a city bus
Dec. 1, 1955, when a white man demanded her seat.
Parks refused and she was jailed and later fined $14.
But her one-woman act of defiance inspired 50,000 blacks in
Montgomery to join in a historic 381-day boycott, organized then
by a little-known Baptist minister, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
So they walked, finally refusing to endure their daily humiliation
on the city's buses.
Parks' bravery became the catalyst for a movement that broke the
back of legalized segregation in the U.S.
Speaking in 1992, she said history too often
maintains "that my feet were hurting and I didn't know why
I refused to stand up when they told me.
"But the real reason of my not standing up was I felt that I had a
right to be treated as any other passenger. We had endured that
kind of treatment for too long."
"At the time I was arrested I had no idea it would turn into this,"
Parks said in 1992. "It was just a day like any other day.
The only thing that made it significant was that the masses of the
people joined in."
The 1956 Montgomery bus boycott, which came two years after
the Supreme Court's landmark declaration that separate schools for
blacks and whites were "inherently unequal," marked the start of the
modern civil rights movement.
It culminated in the 1964 federal Civil Rights Act, which banned
racial discrimination in public accommodations.
Still, after taking her public stand for civil rights, Parks had trouble
finding work in Alabama. Amid threats and harassment, she and her
husband, Raymond, moved to Detroit in 1957.
She worked as an aide to Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) from 1965
until retiring in 1988. Raymond Parks died in 1977.
Parks said upon retiring from her job with Conyers that she wanted to
devote more time to the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self
Development, which she founded in 1987 to develop young leaders.
She worried that young people take legal equality for granted and said
that older blacks "have tried to shield young people from what we have
suffered. And in so doing, we seem to have a more complacent attitude."
"We must double and redouble our efforts to try to say to our youth, to
try to give them an inspiration, an incentive and the will to study our
heritage and to know what it means to be black in America today,"
she said. Parks' health had been declining for the past 10 years.
She was said to be suffering dementia and had stopped making
public appearances.
In one of her last lengthy interviews, she spoke to the Detroit Free Press
in 1995 about what she would like people to say about her after she
passed away.
She said the love of freedom was instilled in her from childhood by her
grandfather - her mother's father with whom she lived when she was
growing up.
He taught his children and grandchildren not to put up with mistreatment.
"It was passed down almost in our genes," Parks wrote in her 1992
autobiography, "My Story."
She recalled that when her grandfather was home, he kept a shotgun by
his side in case the Ku Klux Klan dropped by.
"I'd like people to say I'm a person who always wanted to be free and
wanted it not only for myself; freedom is for all human beings," she told
the Free Press.
With Kerry Burke and News Wire Services
Originally published on October 25, 2005
Link below:
http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/359051p-305923c.html