[Mb-civic] CBC News - ROSA PARKS MOURNED AS 'COURAGEOUS WOMAN, TRUE AMERICAN HERO'

Tue Oct 25 05:52:03 PDT 2005

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ROSA PARKS MOURNED AS 'COURAGEOUS WOMAN, TRUE AMERICAN HERO'
WebPosted Mon Oct 24 23:07:03 2005

---The woman whose name is synonymous with the American civil rights
movement has died.

Rosa Parks, who refused to give up her seat to a white man on a bus in
Montgomery, Ala., in 1955, became the spark that ignited the civil rights
movement in the U.S. South. Laws at the time required black Americans to
give up their seats to white people.

Parks, 92, died of natural causes at her home in Detroit.

In a statement released Monday night, Massaschuseets Senator Edward
Kennedy said: "The nation lost a courageous woman and a true American
hero. A half century ago, Rosa Parks stood up not only for herself, but
for generations upon generations of Americans."

Years later, Parks said "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."

The 42-year-old seamstress was arrested and jailed and later fined $14.

Her simple reply when asked by the bus driver if she was going to give up
her seat was, "No."

"Well, by God, I'm going to have you arrested," the driver said.

"You may do that," Parks told him.

That simple refusal to buckle to the hated whites-only laws in the
American South would erupt into a boycott of the city's bus system by African-
Americans that brought the company to its knees.

But more importantly, it focussed the world's attention on the unjust
laws and discrimination faced by black Americans every day.

"At the time I was arrested I had no idea it would turn into this. 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," she once said in an
interview.

The 381-day boycott was organized by a little-known black leader, Martin
Luther King Jr.

It would also be the first real attack on the hated Jim Crow laws that
had been in place in the South since the end of the Civil War. Those laws
required separation of the races in buses, restaurants and public
accommodations. They also legally sanctioned racial discrimination that
kept blacks out of many jobs and neighbourhoods in the North.

Eventually, the civil rights movement that grew out of the Montgomery bus
boycott was successful in lobbying for the passage of the 1964 federal
Civil Rights Act.

For her part, Parks received so much attention that she was unable to
find work in Alabama and moved to Detroit in 1957. She worked for
Congressman John Conyers for the next 31 years.

She was the recipient of both the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the
Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian honour in the U.S.