[nukkad] ROSA LOUISE MCCAULEY PARKS

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All art, all education, can be merely a supplement to nature. 
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ROSA LOUISE MCCAULEY PARKS (b. Feb. 4, 1913, Tuskegee,
Ala., U.S.), black American civil rights activist
whose refusal to relinquish her seat on a public bus
to a white man precipitated the 1955 Montgomery,
Alabama, bus boycott, recognized as the spark that
ignited the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. 

“Rosa Parks and three other black passengers were
asked to vacate an entire row of seats just behind the
whites-only section of the bus so that one white man
could sit down. Parks recognized the bus driver, James
F. Blake, as the same one who, 12 years earlier, had
evicted her from his bus for boarding through the
front door.
 
At first, the black passengers all remained seated.
The driver then said, "You all make it light on
yourselves and let me have those seats." All stood
except Parks, tired from her day's work as a seamtress
at Montgomery Fair department store and tired of
enduring such treatment. When Blake threatened to call
the police, she said, "You may go on and do so." Two
police officers boarded the bus to arrest her and take
her to jail. She was booked, fingerprinted, jailed and
fined $14. 

Soon after she was released, she was back at work
helping to distribute thousands of fliers urging
blacks not to ride the buses on the day of Parks'
trial. What began as a single day of protest continued
381 days, until the U.S. Supreme Court declared
Montgomery's bus segregation unconstitutional.”  
-- as recounted by Rosa Parks (Chicago Tribune/KRT)”


When asked whether she was afraid that day, she said,
"I have learned over the years that when one's mind is
made up, this diminshes fear." (Investor's Business
Daily) 

Parks finished high school in 1934 and attended
Alabama State College (now Alabama State University).
She made her living as a seamstress. in Montgomery
(1943-56).  Long before her fateful encounter with the
law on Dec. 1, 1955, Rosa Parks had made other quiet
stands against injustice. She walked up and down
stairs rather than take the elevators marked "colored"
and often walked a mile to work -- then back -- rather
than ride the bus because, she said, "The buses were
the worst of the options."  Prior to her arrest, she
served as secretary of the Montgomery National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP). In 1945 she had to register to vote 3 times
before she “passed.”  The administrator failed her the
first two times she took the registration literacy
test. The third time, she wrote down all her answers
on another piece of paper in case she would later need
to prove that she should have passed. But it wasn't
necessary. A few weeks later she received her
certificate in the mail. 

She had run-ins with bus drivers and was evicted from
buses. Parks recalls the humiliation: "I didn't want
to pay my fare and then go around the back door,
because many times, even if you did that, you might
not get on the bus at all. They'd probably shut the
door, drive off, and leave you standing there."Parks's
arrest on Dec. 1, 1955, for violating Montgomery's
segregated seating laws led to an organized boycott of
city buses by blacks, who constituted 70% of the
riders.  Actually, Rosa Parks did not sit in the front
of the bus as is widely believed. She sat in the first
row of the black section.  

It was as president of the Montgomery Improvement
Association, which organized the boycott, that Martin
Luther King, Jr., first came to national prominence.
The boycott continued for 381 days, until Dec. 20,
1956, when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a lower
court's decision declaring Montgomery's segregated
seating unconstitutional. 

In 1957 Parks moved with her husband and mother to
Detroit because of numerous threats to her safety. In
Detroit, she was a staff member for Michigan
congressman John Conyers, Jr, from 1965 to 1988. Her
husband, Raymond, died in 1977. She had no children
born to her, but she has said, "I consider all
children as mine." She remained active in the NAACP
and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. She
now spends most of her year in Detroit but winters in
Los Angeles.  In 1996, then-President Clinton gave
Rosa the highest U.S. civilian honor, the Presidential
Medal of Freedom. 

In 1987 she founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks
Institute for Self-Development, a youth organization.
She and other members of the Institute for
Self-Development have a special program called
“Pathways to Freedom” for young people age 11-18.
Children in the program travel across the country
tracing the Underground Railroad, visiting the scenes
of critical events in the civil rights movement and
learning aspects of America's history. 

Parks has met many renowned leaders and has traveled
throughout the world receiving honors and awards for
her efforts toward racial harmony. She is appreciative
and honored by them but exhibits little emotion over
whom she has met or what she has done. Her response to
being called "the Mother of the Civil Rights Movement"
is modest. "If people think of me in that way, I just
accept the honor and appreciate it," she says. In
August 1994, Parks was attacked in her home by a young
man who wanted money from her. Of the event, she
writes, "I pray for this young man and the conditions
in our country that have made him this way. Despite
the violence and crime in our society, we should not
let fear overwhelm us. We must remain strong." Parks'
belief in God and her religious convictions are at the
core of everything she does. 




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