Civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks has died, Local 4 has learned.
Parks, 92, reportedly died around 7 p.m. Monday, a city source said.
Parks’ refusal to give up her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery, Ala., in 1955 landed her in jail and sparked a bus boycott that is considered the start of the modern civil rights movement.
Parks, was born on Feb. 4, 1913. She now lives in Detroit.
source
If you have children who do not know who Miss Rosa is, please tell them about her.
If you are not white and in the US, please think of Miss Rosa when you ride a subway or bus, and remember the day that Miss Rosa was tired, and did not want to stand up.
Sister Rosa Parks was tired one day
after a hard day on her job.
When all she wanted was a well deserved rest
Not a scene from an angry mob.
A bus driver said, “Lady, you got to get up
cuz a white person wants that seat.”
But Miss Rosa said, “No, not no more.
I’m gonna sit here and rest my feet.”
Thank you Miss Rosa, you are the spark,
You started our freedom movement
Thank you Sister Rosa Parks.
Thank you Miss Rosa you are the spark,
You started our freedom movement
Thank you Sister Rosa Parks.
Now, the police came without fail
And took Sister Rosa off to jail.
And 14 dollars was her fine,
Brother Martin Luther King
knew it was our time.
The people of Montgomery sit down to talk
It was decided all gods’ children should walk
Until segregation was brought to its knees
And we obtain freedom and equality, yeah
Thank you Miss Rosa, you are the spark,
You started our freedom movement
Thank you Sister Rosa Parks.
We’ll sing it again
Thank you Miss Rosa, you are the spark,
You started our freedom movement
Thank you Sister Rosa Parks.
So we dedicate this song to thee
for being the symbol of our dignity.
Thank Sister Rosa Parks.
by the Neville Brothers
may she rest in peace.
Have mercy.
She had a long, productive life in the service of our people.
Rest in peace, Mrs. Parks. Come back again. We need your courage and your grace.
Oh, my God. All I can say is rest in peace.
And that I am forever indebted to you.
Rest in peace…may the angels stand and give you their seat on Heaven’s bus lines…
Her legacy that one quiet woman’s actions can change the course of history will forever be an inspiration. I know that it has been the edge that I have hung on to many times. May she rest in peace.
from Kamakhya’s.
Rosa Parks: A life well lived. RIP.
She’ll always be at the front of the bus where ever she may be and we follow….
May she rest in peace….first class at heaven’s gate.
If you are a human being, please think of Miss Rosa when you ride a subway or bus, and remember the day that Miss Rosa was tired, and did not want to stand up.
And it is worth pointing out that during the bus boycott, there were some white people who volunteered to drive, which in that time, in that place, required no small amount of courage.
Thanks DF. What courage it must have taken in 1955. We have all suffered a great loss.
Because she was courageous. She was an active member of the NAACP and her refusal was a planned act of defiance and demand for respect.
As eugene said on a dKos thread:
And did you know? From Yahoo News “She worked as an aide in the Detroit office of Democratic U.S. Rep. John Conyers, from 1965 until retiring in 1988.”
She showed us the way. Ordinary Americans can make change for the better happen. We owe it to her to continue the fight.
She was tired of injustice, and tired of apartheid.
“I did not really know what would happen. I didn’t feel especially frightened. I felt more annoyed than frightened.”
You’re right, Ductape. I saw the news in an AFP/Reuters sourced story on Australia’s ABC, which concludes:
I noticed, too, that she worked on John Conyers’ staff for over 20 years up to 1988. She was not just a tired 40-something worker, she was an activist who stood by her principles, even if it meant being arrested and losing her job.
I’m glad to see that Bill Clinton gave her the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
I’ll make sure my almost-8yo daughter watches the TV news tonight. I’m sure Rosa Parks’ memory will be honoured, even in Australia. We will discuss the civil rights movement, and try to encourage a passion for justice in a new generation.
Thanks, Janet. I was about to post something to this effect, but I see you and Eugene beat me to it.
As soon as I read of Rosa Parks’ passing, I turned to Paula Giddings’ book, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America to refresh my memory.
At the time of her refusal to give up her seat on the bus, Rosa Parks had been the elected secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP for 12 years. She ran the NAACP office headquarters.
The Montgomery NAACP had been looking for a way to translate the Supreme Court decision on Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education into action. And so had the Women’s Political Council, a Montgomery black women’s group.
“The Women’s Political Council, led by Jo Anne Robinson, had long prepared to transform a singular act of defiance into a city-wide demonstration.
Well before Parks’s arrest, the Women’s Political Council had decided a bus boycott would be an effective tactic, “not to just teach a lesson but to break the system,” said Robinson. “We knew if the women supported it, the men would go along.”
Flyers had already been printed to distribute throughout the community: ” … don’t ride the bus to work, to town, to school, or anyplace … Another Negro woman has been arrested and put in jail because she refused to give up her seat,” the flyers read. Added to the preprinted leaflets were the date and time for the mass meeting and the boycott.
At 5:00 p.m. Jo Anne Robinson heard of the Parks arrest, and within two hours, she said, some fifty thousand leaflets calling for a bus boycott had blanketed the city.”
from When and Where I Enter.“
I think this matters because the folkloric version of Rosa Parks’ action, the one that has been absorbed into “official” American history, validates the American myth of the lone individual striking a blow for freedom, while carefully silencing the much more dangerous history of political organizing.
I honoured Rosa Parks more when I found out her real history. It takes a hell of a lot of strength and courage to spend that much time and energy fighting for political change.
Rest in Peace, Rosa. We’ll try to live up to your work.
Thanks, bc, it is even more heartening to know that this was a political strategy: and one that succeeded!
Montgomery was, in part, basing their actions on a similar boycott in Baton Rouge. NAACP leaders in both cities were in contact with each other regarding successful strategies.
For some reason, people think that Rosa Parks being a lone individual who one day stood up is a more compelling story than a woman who devoted much of her life’s work to resisting Jim Crow…and more of her life fighting for freedom for all Americans. I find the real story even more inspiring.
Somebody had to get on the bus and say no.
Those organizers and leaflet printers were not there with Miss Rosa on the bus, they could not be with her when the driver told her to give up her seat, and no training could give her or anybody else the courage to be that one person who would make a difference.
The organizers could collect the wood, and pile it up, but to make it into a fire that would cook food and warm people, there had to be a spark. 😉
Of course you’re right, DF. And I like your spark and fire metaphor — it says it perfectly.
I was trying to evoke the suppression of the history of political organizing, in your country and mine, and its replacement with the valorizing of isolated, individual action. Why is the mainstream more comfortable with the story of Rosa Parks acting spontaneously, and alone? Because the truth that there are organized political movements dedicated to changing the status quo is too damned scary.
Let the masses believe it’s all about heroes, and who’s going to dare to think they could be a hero? Let us see the truth, that you can do things with the support of a movement that you could never do alone, and our heroes will spring up.
I was 25 years old before I learned that my grandfather had spent months on the picket line in the 30s, striking against B.C. Electric, a long bitter strike that the workers eventually lost. My parents didn’t tell me stories like that — they’d pulled themselves up into the middle class.
My grandfather told me his story when I was on a picket line myself. And he told me he was proud of me for being there. I was grateful to hear it, but angry that I’d never heard it before, that that part of my history had been erased.
That’s what I’m talking about.
I think you should do a diary on this.
Who’s going to dare to think they could be a hero?
Who’s going to dare to say that your grandfather was not one? That you are not?
Thank you for helping me see what has been in front of my fact for longer than – never mind that, just thank you 😀
Gosh. Thank you, DF. Coming from you, whose writing and political analysis I very much respect and admire, that means a lot to me.
As I posted on a dKos RP thread.
It strikes me that a great campaign poster might be a collage of civil rights, union, peace, renters, immigrant, womens’ rights shots etc. under the title “We support our troops.”
Full sized image at the Girl Power site.
Mrs. Rosa Parks died today. I was just looking at my husband’s calendar to see what else had happened on this date beside the founding of the United Nations and the birth of Antonie van Leeuwenhoek – and it is my birthday. A quiet day for me, spent in some hope that this would not be the day on which the 2000th soldier died in Iraq.
But it was a good day for Mrs. Parks to die, and I will always remember her, and think of what her life meant to this country.
It was my privilege to live here in the same city as Mrs. Parks, in her final years. I saw her once, at the grocery store, not long after we moved to Detroit. I was at once like the little kid who is shocked to see his teacher out in a public place. It was so clearly her, doing an ordinary, human task, fingering some vegetables. I wanted to speak to her, but was completely struck dumb: what on earth could I say?
. . . Thank you Sister Rosa. . .
That’s the problem with hagiography, it keeps us from seeing the ordinariness of people who do acts of great courage. We could not do that, we think, because we are not a saint like her. Ordinary people don’t do the great things that she did.
She and her husband did many good things here during their time in Detroit, things not seen in the afterglow of her simple courageous act in Montgomery. Scholarships for kids, many of them, for many years.
But the last years were difficult. A young man broke into her house, looking for money. He was greatly chagrined when he found out who she was. She left her neighborhood and moved into a high-rise apartment where she was safer, but more removed from neighborhood people. Her family became at odds with the people who took care of her physical needs. There were legal actions about use of her name by musicians. Finally, Judge Dennis Archer became her Guardian ad litem, to sort out the various quarrels and questions. A measure of peace was restored, at least in the public view. And finally, the end came.
I think of that great song by Charles Ives, little known, but wonderful: General William Booth Enters Into Heaven.
Somewhere, some day, some fine talented composer should write of Mrs. Parks.
Maybe an opera, or simply her entrance into heaven.
May she rest in peace. May she always be a reminder that one person can make a difference; that one person can be the spark that starts the revolution.
that I could give you a million 4’s for that, as it was my first thought as well.
Instead, I will just light my candle from yours.
about a candle’s light is that when it is spread to another, its flame is not diminished; in fact the light burns brighter by being shared.
Thank you for your leadership Rosa Parks.
What difference can one person make?
A lot.
If that one person says “I will not be moved”.
Of such stuff are revolutions made.
Let us all remember the courage of this woman, of millions of others like her, and hope that the spirit of that courage lives on, and animates us with the heart we will need to fight evil wherever it may manifest itself.
Senator Robert Kennedy is no longer with us–taken before he had a chance to finish his work–but I think it only fitting that he, a fellow person of courage and seeker of justice and truth like Mrs. Parks, should write her epitaph. I can give no person higher praise than to say this:
“Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”–Senator Robert F. Kennedy.
I wish I had 1/10th of her courage and bravery…a true American hero.
A simple act…non-violent…yet audacious at the time. How many of us can commit such simple acts?
And let us also remember those who first integrated colleges and high schools, lunch counters…who faced hostility and harassment every day and yet soldiered on.
So I told my wife just now that Miss Rosa had died. After asking how old she was she said, “Now there was a lady.”
That’s exactly right isn’t it. And a gentleman doesn’t ask a lady to give up her seat.
Light A Candle For
Peace, Tolerance and Understanding
May Rosa Ride In The Front Of The Bus For Eternity
RIP
**