NEWS WATCH: Rosa Parks, “Mother of US Civil-Rights Movement”, Dies

civil rights movement in the United States, has died at the age of 92, her lawyer said Tuesday, October 25.

Parks’ protest in 1955 triggered a 381-day boycott of buses, organized by the then little-known Baptist minister Martin Luther King Jr. That protest movement eventually brought about the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which outlawed racial discrimination in the US. Parks’ lawyer, Shirley Kaigler, said she died in her sleep at her home in Detroit, Michigan, with close friends and family members by her side.

"She just fell asleep and didn’t wake up," Kaigler reportedly said. The cause of death was not immediately known. Medical records released earlier this year, as part of a long-running legal dispute over the use of Parks’ name in a song by the hip-hop group OutKast, revealed she was suffering from progressive dementia, Reuters news agency reported. She rarely appeared in public in recent years.

Memorialized in poetry, dance and song, Parks was, by most accounts, both simpler and more complex than the mythology that grew around her. "If you had seen Rosa Parks walking down the street, in recent years, you would never guess that the slender, silver-haired lady with large spectacles had anything to do with an event that ignited black civil rights as one of the main national issues of the middle 20th Century," commented the Voice Of America (VOA) network.

ALABAMA WOMAN

She was born February 4, 1913, in Tuskegee, Alabama, to Leona Edwards, a teacher, and James McCauley, a carpenter and builder. Her parents split up when she was 5, prompting her mother to move Rosa and her younger brother Sylvester to live with family in Pine Level, a small town near Montgomery, where she later became known as the "mother of the civil rights movement."

Her moment in the spotlight began December 1, 1955, when she finished her work as a seamstress in a Montgomery, Alabama, store and boarded a city bus to go home. She took a seat in the 11th row, behind the seats reserved exclusively for white passengers, as required by the city’s segregation law at that time.

Blacks were entitled to seats from the 11th row to the rear of a bus. However, the city law said if the first 10 rows were filled, a white passenger could request a seat in the back of a bus. Rosa Parks remembered the bus was crowded with people standing in the aisle when several whites boarded. A white man told the driver he wanted a seat.

The driver, who had the authority under city law, went to the rear of the bus and ordered Parks and three other black passengers to get up. The others reluctantly stood. Rosa Parks, tired after a day of work, refused.

READY FOR ARREST

"When they stood up and I stayed where I was, he asked me if I was going to stand and I told him that ‘no, I wasn’t,’ and he told me if I did not stand up he was going to have me arrested. And, I told him to go on and have me arrested," Parks said in a recorded interview aired Tuesday on VOA. The bus driver called the police and when they arrived he told them he needed the seats for his white passengers.

"He pointed at me and said, ‘that one won’t stand up.’ The two policemen came near me and only one spoke to me. He asked me if the driver had asked me to stand up? I said, ‘yes.’ He asked me why I didn’t stand up,"  Parks said.

"I told him I didn’t think I should have to stand up. So I asked him: ‘Why do you push us around?’ And he told me, ‘I don’t know, but the law is the law and you are under arrest.’"

Parks said her decision to remain seated was based on her desire to be treated with decency and dignity. "This was not the way I wanted to be treated after I had paid the same fare this man had paid — he hadn’t paid any more than I did but I had worked all day and I can recall feeling quite annoyed and inconvenienced. And I was very determined to, in this way, show that I felt that I wanted to be treated decently on this bus or where ever I was," Parks added.

HELPING COLORED PEOPLE

Rosa Parks, who worked for the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the NAACP, stressed she had not intended to provoke her arrest.

"I had only intended to go home and take care of whatever matters I had because I had an NAACP youth conference that weekend and I also was getting out the notices for the senior branch of the NAACP (convention). I didn’t move because I didn’t feel like it was helping us or making things lighter [easier] for us — me as an individual and us as a people to continue to be pushed around because of our race and color," Parks said in the interview.

Her arrest for violating the city segregation law was the catalyst for a mass boycott by blacks of the city’s buses, whose ridership had been 70 percent black. That boycott brought the young minister Martin Luther King, Junior, to national prominence as the head of the Montgomery Improvement Association, the group that organized and led the protest.

The Montgomery Improvement Association also filed a federal suit challenging the constitutionality of the segregation law on February first, 1956.  The boycott lasted until December 20, 1956, when the United States Supreme Court ordered city officials to desegregate their buses. 

BILLY GRAHAM

It also pressured churches to change. "Eleven o’clock Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in America," declared King Jr in a well-known line he used a number of times. Analysts say he borrowed the line from American evangelist Billy Graham, who himself began changing the way his evangelistic meetings, also known as ‘crusades’ were conducted in the 1950’s.

During a 1952 crusade in Jackson, Mississippi, he rejected Governor Hugh White’s suggestion to conduct separate meetings for blacks and soon tore down the ropes that separated blacks and whites. Five years later in New York City, he approached black Christians and asked King to pray before the meetings began.    

Yet, as the changes unfolded across America, Parks and her husband, Raymond, eventually moved to Detroit in 1957, after she lost her job and apparently received numerous death threats in Alabama. From 1965 to 1988, she worked as an aide to US Rep. John Conyers, a Michigan Democrat and founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus.

"LITTLE BIT AFRAID"

"For a long time people were a little bit afraid of Rosa Parks because she had created this whole new modern civil rights movement," Conyers told Detroit radio late on Monday in an interview monitored by Reuters news agency.

"They didn’t know what to expect, and they certainly didn’t expect someone that quiet. She sought no limelight; you’d never hear her talking about her own civil rights activities and all the things that she had been in," he said. "She has saint-like qualities," Conyers added.

Parks’ husband died in 1977. The couple had no children and Parks’ closest living relatives are her brother’s 13 sons and daughters. She received the highest U.S. civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, in 1996 and Congressional Gold Medal of Honor in 1999. Recommending the medal for Parks that year, the U.S. Senate described her as "a living icon for freedom in America."

"SISTER ROSA"

She also received honorary university degrees and various awards from civil rights organizations. The city of Detroit, Michigan, named a street for her. In 1989, one of the most unusual tributes came from the Neville Brothers singing group who honored her by writing a song entitled "Sister Rosa." Its reggae chorus is: "Thank you Miss Rosa / You are the spark / You started our freedom movement," VOA recalled.

Rosa Parks said she wanted to be remembered "as a person who wanted to be free and wanted others to be free."

"We are saddened by the passing of Rosa Parks. We rejoice in her legacy, which will never die. In many ways, history is marked as before, and after, Rosa Parks," Reuters news agency quoted civil rights leader Jesse Jackson as saying. "She sat down in order that we all might stand up, and the walls of segregation came down."  

Sen. Edward Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat, said in a published statement: "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." (With additional reporting by Stefan J. Bos, BosNewsLife Research and reports from the United States).