Black History Month – Rosa Parks

I have an autographed copy of this picture of Rosa Parks being booked for her act of courage of refusing a bus driver’s instructions to give up her seat to a white passenger.  She later said that her refusal was not because she was physically tired but because she was tired of giving in.

Rosa was born on February 4th 1913 in Tuskegee, Alabama making her a Aquarian like me :).  She married Raymond Parks in 1932 who was an activist in the effort to free the “Scottsboro Boys“.  Together they worked in the NAACP.  He was an active member and she was the secretary and youth leader of the local branch.

At the time of her arrest she was preparing for a major youth conference.  After her arrest, the black people of Montgomery and sympathizers of other races promoted a boycott of the city bus line that lasted for 381 days. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was appointed as the boycott’s spokesperson and taught non-violence to all the participants. The protests spread throughout the south and the country in the form of sit-ins, eat-ins, swim-ins and other civil disobedience.

Rosa moved to Detroit in 1957 and because a deaconess in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church.  Congressman John Conyers of Michigan employed her from 1965 to 1988. Rosa Parks received more than forty-three honorary doctorate degrees and hundreds of awards and keys to many cities.  Among them are the United Auto Workers’ Social Justice award and in 1996 President Clinton awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Michigan designated the first Monday following February 4th to be Mrs. Rosa Parks Day.  She was voted by Time to the one of the 100 most influential people in the 20th century.  She attended the State of the Union address in 1999 where she was acknowledged by President Clinton and received a bi-partisan standing ovation. She was voted the Congressional Gold Medal of Honor in 1999.

Rosa Parks, a true American heroine, wrote four books, had a movie made of her life.  She was truly an exemplification of courage, dignity and non-violent participatory democracy.