WASHINGTON, Oct 27: The US House and Senate have endorsed a measure to name a Detroit federal building after civil rights pioneer Rosa Lee Parks. The black woman who refused to give up her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955 died on Monday in Detroit at age 92.
The House and Senate approved resolutions on Wednesday afternoon to rename the building that houses the Federal Homeland Security Office as the Rosa Parks Federal Building.
Mrs Parks was 42 when she made history in 1955. She was sitting on a bus in Montgomery when a white man demanded her seat. Mrs Parks refused, defying the rules which required blacks to give up their seats to whites.
She was arrested and fined. Her treatment triggered a 381-day boycott of the bus system, organized by a young and little known Martin Luther King Junior.
The Montgomery bus boycott marked the birth of the civil rights movement in the United States.
Seven years later, Rosa Parks recalled that momentous day in a radio interview:
Mrs Parks: “The driver said that if I refused to leave the seat, he would have to call the police and I told him just call the police, which he did and when they came, they placed me under arrest.”
Reporter: “Wasn’t that a pretty frightening thing, to be arrested in Montgomery, Alabama?”
Mrs Parks: “No, I wasn’t afraid at all.”
Reporter: “You weren’t frightened, why weren’t you frightened?”
Mrs Parks: “I don’t know why I wasn’t, but I didn’t feel afraid. I had decided that I would have to know once and for all what rights I had as a human being and a citizen, even in Montgomery, Alabama.”
