Name: Rosa Parks Age: The count stopped at 92 Nationality: Afro-American Claim to fame: The woman whose act of defiance brought about the civil rights movement in the US
All great changes begin with a small act and this also holds true for America’s civil rights revolution. Rosa Parks refused to get up from her seat on a bus to let a white man sit, and this simple act galvanized a movement that changed the social scene of America.
This iconic figure of the 20th Century who helped make other Americans aware of the civil rights struggle, passed away in her sleep on October 24 at the age of 92. She was 42, when on returning home from work on December 1, 1955, she boarded a crowded bus and sat in the coloured section of it. When the section for the whites became full, the blacks were asked to get up and move to the back so that a white man could sit. Three blacks sitting with Mrs Parks got up and moved back. Rosa kept sitting.
The petite seamstress refused to get up and when warned that she could be arrest, she told them to go ahead and do so. Parks was jailed and fined 14 dollars for her small act of defiance. And this launched a crippling 382-day boycott by blacks of Montgomery’s bus system. During the boycott, black workers and school children walked to their jobs and schools or paid black-owned taxis 10 cents — the same amount as the bus fare — to get to their destination.
Rosa Parks challenged the constitutionality of Montgomery’s segregation laws that eventually led to the disintegration of institutionalized segregation in the South. The boycott raised an unknown Baptist minister Martin Luther King Jr., to national prominence and his protest movement brought about the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which outlawed racial discrimination in the US.
Possessing a quite fortitude, Rosa has been a symbol of human dignity in the face of brutal authority. The frustration in society due to racial discrimination was very acute and as a result her one small act of defiance galvanized a generation of activists who demanded equal rights for all races, and earned her the title ‘mother of the civil rights movement’. This pioneer in the struggle for racial equality was the recipient of innumerable honours, such as the Martin Luther King Jr. Nonviolent Peace Prize, the Congressional Gold Medal, followed by the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honour given by the US executive branch. She was also awarded two dozen honorary doctorates from universities worldwide.
Mrs Parks and her husband, Raymond, moved to Detroit in 1957, after she lost her job and received numerous death threats in Alabama. She worked as an aide in the Detroit office of Democratic Congressman John Conyers from 1965 until she retired in 1988.
Detailing her famous act of defiance, in her autobiography, My Story, Parks wrote: “People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day.... No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.” — Salman Younus
Name: Rosa Parks
