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Rosa Parks

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Historical figures

                               Rosa Parks
   Rosa Parks in 1955, with Martin Luther King, Jr. in the background.
   Born February 4, 1913
        Tuskegee, Alabama, USA
   Died October 24, 2005
        Detroit, Michigan, USA

   Rosa Louise McCauley Parks ( February 4, 1913 – October 24, 2005) was
   an African American seamstress and civil rights activist whom the U.S.
   Congress dubbed the "Mother of the Modern-Day Civil Rights Movement".

   Parks is famous for her refusal on December 1, 1955 to obey bus driver
   James Blake's demand that she relinquish her seat to a white passenger.
   Her subsequent arrest and trial for this act of civil disobedience
   triggered the Montgomery Bus Boycott, one of the largest and most
   successful mass movements against racial segregation in history, and
   launched Martin Luther King, Jr., one of the organizers of the boycott,
   to the forefront of the civil rights movement. Her role in American
   history earned her an iconic status in American culture, and her
   actions have left an enduring legacy for civil rights movements around
   the world.

Early years

   Rosa Parks was born Rosa Louise McCauley in Tuskegee, Alabama on
   February 4, 1913 to James and Leona McCauley, respectively, a carpenter
   and a teacher. Small, even for a child, she suffered poor health and
   had chronic tonsillitis. When her parents separated, she moved with her
   mother to Pine Level, Alabama, just outside Montgomery. There she grew
   up on a farm with her maternal grandparents, mother, and younger
   brother Sylvester, and began her lifelong membership in the African
   Methodist Episcopal Church. She was homeschooled by her mother until
   she was eleven, then enrolled at the Industrial School for Girls in
   Montgomery where she took academic and vocational courses. Parks then
   went on to a laboratory school set up by the Alabama State Teachers
   College for Negroes for secondary education, but was forced to drop out
   to care for her grandmother, and later for her mother, after they
   became ill.

   Under Jim Crow laws, black and white people were segregated in
   virtually every aspect of daily life in the South, including public
   transportation. Bus and train companies did not provide separate
   vehicles for the different races, but did enforce seating policies that
   allocated separate sections for blacks and whites. School bus
   transportation, however, was unavailable in any form for black
   schoolchildren in the South. Parks recalled going to elementary school
   in Pine Level, where school buses took white students to their new
   school and black students had to walk to theirs: "I'd see the bus pass
   every day… But to me, that was a way of life; we had no choice but to
   accept what was the custom. The bus was among the first ways I realized
   there was a black world and a white world."

   Though Parks' autobiography recounts that some of her earliest memories
   are of the kindness of white strangers, her situation made it
   impossible to ignore racism. When the Ku Klux Klan marched down the
   street in front of her house, Parks recalls her grandfather guarding
   the front door with a shotgun. The Montgomery Industrial School,
   founded and staffed by white Northerners for black children, was burned
   twice by arsonists, and its faculty was ostracized by the white
   community.

   In 1932, Rosa married Raymond Parks, a barber from Montgomery, at her
   mother's house. Raymond was a member of the National Association for
   the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), at the time collecting money
   to support the Scottsboro Boys, a group of black men falsely accused of
   raping two white women. After her marriage, Rosa took a number of jobs,
   ranging from domestic worker to hospital aide. At her husband's urging,
   she finished her high school studies in 1933, at a time when less than
   7% of African Americans had a high school diploma. Despite the Jim Crow
   laws that made political participation by black people difficult, she
   succeeded in registering to vote on her third try.

   In December 1943, Parks became active in the Civil Rights Movement,
   joined the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP, and was elected volunteer
   secretary to its president, Edgar Nixon. Of her position, she later
   said, "I was the only woman there, and they needed a secretary, and I
   was too timid to say no." She would continue as secretary until 1957.
   In the 1940s, Parks and her husband were also members of the Voters'
   League. Sometime soon after 1944, she held a brief job at Maxwell Air
   Force Base, a federally owned area where racial segregation was not
   allowed, and rode on an integrated trolley. Speaking to her biographer,
   Parks noted, "You might just say Maxwell opened my eyes up." Parks also
   worked as a housekeeper and seamstress for a white couple, Clifford and
   Virginia Durr. The politically liberal Durrs became her friends, and
   encouraged Parks to attend, and eventually helped sponsor her at the
   Highlander Folk School, an education centre for workers' rights and
   racial equality in Monteagle, Tennessee, in the summer of 1955.

   Like many black people, Parks was deeply moved by the brutal murder of
   Emmett Till in August 1955. On November 27, 1955—only four days before
   she refused to give up her seat—she later recalled that she had
   attended a mass meeting in Montgomery which focused on this case as
   well as the recent murders of George W. Lee and Lamar Smith. The
   featured speaker at the meeting was T.R.M. Howard, a black civil rights
   leader from Mississippi who headed the Regional Council of Negro
   Leadership.

Civil rights activism

Events leading up to boycott

   In 1944, athletic star Jackie Robinson took a similar stand in a
   confrontation with an Army officer in Fort Hood, Texas, refusing to
   move to the back of a bus. He was brought before a court-martial, which
   acquitted him. The NAACP had accepted and litigated other cases before,
   such as that of Irene Morgan ten years earlier, which resulted in a
   victory in the U.S. Supreme Court on Commerce Clause grounds. That
   victory, however, overturned state segregation laws only insofar as
   they applied to travel in interstate commerce, such as interstate bus
   travel. Black activists had begun to build a case around the arrest of
   a 15-year-old girl, Claudette Colvin, a student at Booker T. Washington
   High School in Montgomery. On March 2, 1955, Colvin was handcuffed,
   arrested and forcibly removed from a public bus when she refused to
   give up her seat to a white man. She screamed that her constitutional
   rights were being violated. At the time, Colvin was active in the
   NAACP's Youth Council, a group to which Rosa Parks served as Advisor.
   Seat layout on the bus where Parks sat, December 1, 1955.
   Enlarge
   Seat layout on the bus where Parks sat, December 1, 1955.

   Colvin recollected, "Mrs. Parks said, 'Always do what was right.'"
   Parks was raising money for Colvin's defense, but when E.D. Nixon
   learned that Colvin was pregnant, it was decided that Colvin was an
   unsuitable symbol for their cause. Soon after her arrest she had
   conceived a child with a much older married man, a moral transgression
   that scandalized the deeply religious black community. Strategists
   believed that the segregationist white press would use Colvin's
   pregnancy to undermine any boycott. Some historians have argued that
   civil rights leaders, who were predominantly middle class, were uneasy
   with Colvin's impoverished background. The NAACP also had considered,
   but rejected, earlier protesters deemed unable or unsuitable to
   withstand the pressures of cross-examination in a legal challenge to
   racial segregation laws. Colvin was also known to engage in verbal
   outbursts and cursing. Many of the legal charges against Colvin were
   dropped. A boycott and legal case never materialized from the Colvin
   case law, and legal strategists continued to seek a complainant beyond
   reproach.

   In Montgomery, Alabama, the first four rows of bus seats were reserved
   for white people. Buses had "colored" sections for black people—who
   made up more than 75 % of the bus system's riders—generally in the rear
   of the bus. These sections were not fixed in size, but were determined
   by the placement of a movable sign. Black people also could sit in the
   middle rows, until the white section was full. Then they had to move to
   seats in the rear, stand, or, if there was no room, leave the bus.
   Black people were not allowed to sit across the aisle from white
   people. The driver also could move the "colored" section sign, or
   remove it altogether. If white people were already sitting in the
   front, black people could board to pay the fare, but then had to
   disembark and reenter through the rear door. There were times when the
   bus departed before the black customers who had paid made it to the
   back entrance.

   For years, the black community had complained that the situation was
   unfair, and Parks was no exception: "My resisting being mistreated on
   the bus did not begin with that particular arrest…I did a lot of
   walking in Montgomery." Parks had her first run-in on the public bus on
   a rainy day in 1943, when the bus driver, James Blake, demanded that
   she get off the bus and reenter through the back door. As she began to
   exit by the front door, she dropped her purse. Parks sat down for a
   moment in a seat for white passengers, apparently to pick up her purse.
   The bus driver was enraged and barely let her step off the bus before
   speeding off. Rosa walked more than five miles home in the rain.

Montgomery Bus Boycott

   Fingerprint card of Rosa Parks.
   Enlarge
   Fingerprint card of Rosa Parks.

   After a day at work at Montgomery Fair department store, Parks boarded
   the Cleveland Avenue bus at around 6 p.m., Thursday, December 1, 1955,
   in downtown Montgomery. She paid her fare and sat in an empty seat in
   the first row of back seats reserved for blacks in the "colored"
   section, which was near the middle of the bus and directly behind the
   ten seats reserved for white passengers. Initially, she had not noticed
   that the bus driver was the same man, James F. Blake, who had left her
   in the rain in 1943. As the bus traveled along its regular route, all
   of the white-only seats in the bus filled up. The bus reached the third
   stop in front of the Empire Theatre, and several white passengers
   boarded.

   In 1900, Montgomery had passed a city ordinance for the purpose of
   segregating passengers by race. Conductors were given the power to
   assign seats to accomplish that purpose; however, no passengers would
   be required to move or give up their seat and stand if the bus was
   crowded and no other seats were available. Over time and by custom,
   however, Montgomery bus drivers had adopted the practice of requiring
   black riders to move whenever there were no white only seats left.

   So, following standard practice, bus driver Blake noted that the front
   of the bus was filled with white passengers and there were two or three
   men standing, and thus moved the "colored" section sign behind Parks
   and demanded that four black people give up their seats in the middle
   section so that the white passengers could sit. Years later, in
   recalling the events of the day, Parks said, "When that white driver
   stepped back toward us, when he waved his hand and ordered us up and
   out of our seats, I felt a determination cover my body like a quilt on
   a winter night."

   By Parks' account, Blake said, "Y'all better make it light on
   yourselves and let me have those seats." Three of them complied. Parks
   said, "The driver wanted us to stand up, the four of us. We didn't move
   at the beginning, but he says, 'Let me have these seats.' And the other
   three people moved, but I didn't." The black man sitting next to her
   gave up his seat. Parks moved, but toward the window seat; she did not
   get up to move to the newly repositioned colored section. Blake then
   said, "Why don't you stand up?" Parks responded, "I don't think I
   should have to stand up." Blake called the police to arrest Parks. When
   recalling the incident for Eyes on the Prize, a 1987 public television
   series on the Civil Rights Movement, Parks said, "When he saw me still
   sitting, he asked if I was going to stand up, and I said, 'No, I'm
   not.' And he said, 'Well, if you don't stand up, I'm going to have to
   call the police and have you arrested.' I said, 'You may do that.'"

   During a 1956 radio interview with Sydney Rogers in West Oakland
   several months after her arrest, when asked why she had decided not to
   vacate her bus seat, Parks said, "I would have to know for once and for
   all what rights I had as a human being and a citizen of Montgomery,
   Alabama."

   Parks also detailed her motivation in her autobiography, My Story


   Rosa Parks

    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. I was not old, although some
   people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the
                  only tired I was, was tired of giving in.


   Rosa Parks

   Police report on Rosa Parks, December 1, 1955, page 1.
   Enlarge
   Police report on Rosa Parks, December 1, 1955, page 1.

   When Parks refused to give up her seat, a police officer arrested her.
   As the officer took her away, she recalled that she asked, "Why do you
   push us around?" The officer's response as she remembered it was, "I
   don't know, but the law's the law, and you're under arrest." She later
   said, "I only knew that, as I was being arrested, that it was the very
   last time that I would ever ride in humiliation of this kind."

   Parks was charged with a violation of Chapter 6, Section 11 segregation
   law of the Montgomery City code, even though she technically had not
   taken up a white-only seat—she had been in a colored section. E.D.
   Nixon and Clifford Durr bailed Parks out of jail the evening of
   December 1.

   That evening, Nixon conferred with Alabama State College professor Jo
   Ann Robinson about Parks' case. Robinson, a member of the Women's
   Political Council (WPC), stayed up all night mimeographing over 35,000
   handbills announcing a bus boycott. The Women's Political Council was
   the first group to officially endorse the boycott.

   On Sunday, December 4, 1955, plans for the Montgomery Bus Boycott were
   announced at black churches in the area, and a front-page article in
   The Montgomery Advertiser helped spread the word. At a church rally
   that night, attendees unanimously agreed to continue the boycott until
   they were treated with the level of courtesy they expected, until black
   drivers were hired, and until seating in the middle of the bus was
   handled on a first-come basis.

   Four days later, Parks was tried on charges of disorderly conduct and
   violating a local ordinance. The trial lasted 30 minutes. Parks was
   found guilty and fined $10, plus $4 in court costs. Parks appealed her
   conviction and formally challenged the legality of racial segregation.
   In a 1992 interview with National Public Radio's Lynn Neary, Parks
   recalled:


   Rosa Parks

     I did not want to be mistreated, I did not want to be deprived of a
   seat that I had paid for. It was just time... there was opportunity for
     me to take a stand to express the way I felt about being treated in
     that manner. I had not planned to get arrested. I had plenty to do
   without having to end up in jail. But when I had to face that decision,
   I didn't hesitate to do so because I felt that we had endured that too
      long. The more we gave in, the more we complied with that kind of
                  treatment, the more oppressive it became.


   Rosa Parks

   Police report on Rosa Parks, December 1, 1955, page 2.
   Enlarge
   Police report on Rosa Parks, December 1, 1955, page 2.

   On Monday, December 5, 1955, after the success of the one-day boycott,
   a group of 16 to 18 people gathered at the Mt. Zion AME Zion Church to
   discuss boycott strategies. The group agreed that a new organization
   was needed to lead the boycott effort if it were to continue. Rev.
   Ralph David Abernathy suggested the name " Montgomery Improvement
   Association" (MIA). The name was adopted, and the MIA was formed. Its
   members elected as their president a relative newcomer to Montgomery, a
   young and mostly unknown minister of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Dr.
   Martin Luther King, Jr.

   That Monday night, 50 leaders of the African American community
   gathered to discuss the proper actions to be taken in response to
   Parks' arrest. E.D. Nixon said, "My God, look what segregation has put
   in my hands!" Parks was the ideal plaintiff for a test case against
   city and state segregation laws. While the 15-year-old Claudette
   Colvin, unwed and pregnant, had been deemed unacceptable to be the
   centre of a civil rights mobilization, King stated that, "Mrs. Parks,
   on the other hand, was regarded as one of the finest citizens of
   Montgomery—not one of the finest Negro citizens, but one of the finest
   citizens of Montgomery." Parks was securely married and employed,
   possessed a quiet and dignified demeanor, and was politically savvy.

   The day of Parks' trial- Monday, December 5, 1955- the WPC distributed
   the 35,000 leaflets. The handbill read, "We are…asking every Negro to
   stay off the buses Monday in protest of the arrest and trial…. You can
   afford to stay out of school for one day. If you work, take a cab, or
   walk. But please, children and grown-ups, don't ride the bus at all on
   Monday. Please stay off the buses Monday."

   It rained that day, but the black community persevered in their
   boycott. Some rode in carpools, while others traveled in black-operated
   cabs that charged the same fare as the bus, 10 cents. Most of the
   remainder of the 40,000 black commuters walked, some as far as 20
   miles. In the end, the boycott lasted for 382 days. Dozens of public
   buses stood idle for months, severely damaging the bus transit
   company's finances, until the law requiring segregation on public buses
   was lifted.

   Some segregationists retaliated with terrorism. Black churches were
   burned or dynamited. Martin Luther King's home was bombed in the early
   morning hours of January 30, 1956, and E.D. Nixon's home was also
   attacked. However, the black community's bus boycott marked one of the
   largest and most successful mass movements against racial segregation.
   It sparked many other protests, and it catapulted King to the forefront
   of the Civil Rights Movement.

   Through her role in sparking the boycott, Rosa Parks played an
   important part in internationalizing the awareness of the plight of
   African Americans and the civil rights struggle. King wrote in his 1958
   book Stride Toward Freedom that Parks' arrest was the precipitating
   factor, rather than the cause, of the protest: "The cause lay deep in
   the record of similar injustices…. Actually, no one can understand the
   action of Mrs. Parks unless he realizes that eventually the cup of
   endurance runs over, and the human personality cries out, 'I can take
   it no longer.'"

   The Montgomery bus boycott was also the inspiration for the bus boycott
   in the township of Alexandria, Eastern Cape of South Africa which was
   one of the key events in the radicalization of the black majority of
   that country under the leadership of the African National Congress.

Browder v. Gayle

   Immediately after the initiation of the bus boycott, legal strategists
   began to discuss the need for a federal lawsuit to challenge city and
   state bus segregation laws, and approximately two months after the
   boycott began, they reconsidered Claudette Colvin's case. Attorneys
   Fred Gray, E.D. Nixon and Clifford Durr (a white lawyer who, with his
   wife, Virginia, was an activist in the Civil Rights Movement and a
   former employer of Parks) searched for the ideal case law to challenge
   the constitutional legitimacy of city and state bus segregation laws.
   Parks' case was not used as the basis for the federal lawsuit because,
   as a criminal case, it would have had to make its way through the state
   criminal appeals process before a federal appeal could have been filed.
   City and state officials could have delayed a final rendering for
   years. Furthermore, attorney Durr believed it possible that the outcome
   would merely have been the vacating of Parks' conviction, with no
   changes in segregation laws.

   Gray researched for a better lawsuit, consulting with NAACP legal
   counsels Robert Carter and Thurgood Marshall, who would later become
   U.S. Solicitor General and a U.S. Supreme Court justice. Gray
   approached Aurelia Browder, Susie McDonald, Claudette Colvin and Mary
   Louise Smith, all women who had had disputes involving the Montgomery
   bus system the previous year. They all agreed to become plaintiffs in a
   civil action law suit. Browder was a Montgomery housewife, Gayle the
   mayor of Montgomery. February 1, 1956, the case of Browder v. Gayle was
   filed in U.S. District Court by Fred Gray. It was Browder v. Gayle that
   brought segregation to an end on public buses.

   June 19, 1956, the U.S. District Court's three-judge panel ruled that
   Section 301 (31a, 31b and 31c) of Title 48, Code of Alabama, 1940, as
   amended, and Sections 10 and 11 of Chapter 6 of the Code of the City of
   Montgomery, 1952, "deny and deprive plaintiffs and other Negro citizens
   similarly situated of the equal protection of the laws and due process
   of law secured by the Fourteenth Amendment" ( Browder v. Gayle, 1956).
   The court essentially decided that the precedent of Brown v. Board of
   Education (1954) could be applied to Browder v. Gayle. November 13,
   1956, the United States Supreme Court outlawed racial segregation on
   buses, deeming it unconstitutional. The court order arrived in
   Montgomery, Alabama, December 20, 1956, and the bus boycott ended the
   next day. However, more violence erupted following the court order, as
   snipers fired into buses and into King's home, and terrorists threw
   bombs into churches and into the homes of many church ministers,
   including Martin Luther King Jr.'s friend Ralph Abernathy.

Later years

   After her arrest, Parks became an icon of the Civil Rights Movement,
   but suffered hardships as a result. She lost her job at the department
   store, and her husband quit his job after his boss forbade him from
   talking about his wife or the legal case. Parks traveled and spoke
   extensively. In 1957, Raymond and Rosa Parks left Montgomery for
   Hampton, Virginia—mostly because she was unable to find work, but also
   because of disagreements with King and other leaders of Montgomery's
   struggling civil rights movement. In Hampton, she found a job as a
   hostess in an inn at black Hampton Institute. Later that year, after
   the urging of her younger brother Sylvester Parks, her husband Raymond,
   and her mother Leona McCauley, moved to Detroit, Michigan.

   Parks worked as a seamstress until 1965, when African-American U.S.
   Representative John Conyers ( D- Michigan) hired her as a secretary and
   receptionist for his congressional office in Detroit. She held this
   position until she retired in 1988. In a telephone interview with CNN
   on October 24, 2005, Conyers recalled, "You treated her with deference
   because she was so quiet, so serene—just a very special person…. There
   is only one Rosa Parks." Later in life, Parks also served as a member
   of the Board of Advocates of the Planned Parenthood Federation of
   America.

   Rosa Parks and Elaine Eason Steele co-founded the Rosa and Raymond
   Parks Institute for Self Development in February 1987, in honour of
   Rosa's husband, who died from cancer in 1977. The institute runs the
   "Pathways to Freedom" bus tours, which introduce young people to
   important civil rights and Underground Railroad sites throughout the
   country. On a 1997 trip, the Pathways to Freedom bus drove into a
   river, resulting in the death of Adisa Foluke. Foluke, who was referred
   to as Parks' adopted grandson, also had been a chaperon on the bus.
   Several others were injured.

   In 1992, Parks published Rosa Parks: My Story, an autobiography aimed
   at younger readers which details her life leading up to her decision
   not to give up her seat. In 1995, she published her memoirs, titled
   Quiet Strength, which focuses on the role that her faith had played in
   her life.

   August 30, 1994, Joseph Skipper, an African-American drug addict,
   attacked the then 81-year-old Parks in her home. The incident sparked
   outrage throughout America. After his arrest, Skipper said that he had
   not known he was in Parks' home, but recognized her after entering.
   Skipper asked, "Hey, aren't you Rosa Parks?" to which she replied,
   "Yes." She handed him $3 when he demanded money, and an additional $50
   when he demanded more. Before fleeing, Skipper struck Parks in the
   face. Skipper was arrested and charged with various breaking and
   entering offenses against Parks and other neighbourhood victims. He
   admitted guilt and, on August 8, 1995, was sentenced to eight to 15
   years in prison.

   A comedic scene in the 2002 film Barbershop featured a cantankerous
   barber, played by Cedric the Entertainer, arguing with co-workers and
   shop patrons that other African Americans before Parks had resisted
   giving up their seats in defiance of Jim Crow laws, and that she had
   received undeserved fame because of her status as an NAACP secretary.
   Activists Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton launched a boycott against the
   film, contending it was "disrespectful", but then-NAACP president
   Kweisi Mfume stated he thought the controversy was "overblown." The
   scene also offended Parks, who boycotted the NAACP 2003 Image Awards
   ceremony, which Cedric hosted. "Barbershop" received nominations in
   four awards categories that, including a "Best Supporting Actor in a
   Motion Picture" nomination for Cedric. He did not win in that category,
   however, but won an award for his work as a supporting actor in the
   television series The Proud Family.

Lawsuits

   In March 1999, a lawsuit was filed on Parks' behalf against American
   hip-hop duo OutKast and LaFace Records, claiming that the group had
   illegally used Rosa Parks' name without her permission for the song
   "Rosa Parks", the most successful radio single of OutKast's 1998 album
   Aquemini. The song's chorus, which Parks' legal defense felt was
   disrespectful to Parks, is as follows: "Ah ha, hush that fuss /
   Everybody move to the back of the bus / Do you want to bump and slump
   with us / We the type of people make the club get crunk."

   The case was dismissed in November 1999 by US District Court Judge
   Barbara Hackett. In August 2000, Parks hired attorney Johnnie Cochran
   to help her appeal the district court's decision. Cochran argued that
   the song did not have First Amendment protection because, although its
   title carried Parks' name, its lyrics were not about her. However, U.S.
   District Judge Barbara Hackett upheld OutKast's right to use Parks'
   name in November 1999, and Parks took the case to the 6th U.S. Circuit
   Court of Appeals, where some charges were remanded for further trial.

   Parks' attorneys and caretaker, Elaine Steele, refiled in August 2004,
   and named BMG, Arista Records and LaFace Records as the defendants,
   along with several parties not directly connected to the song,
   including Barnes & Noble and Borders Group for selling the song, and
   Gregory Dark and Braddon Mendelson, the director and producer,
   respectively, of the 1998 music video, asking for $5 billion in
   damages.

   In October 2004, U.S. District Judge George Caram Steeh appointed
   Dennis Archer, a former mayor of Detroit and Michigan Supreme Court
   justice, as guardian of legal matters for Parks after her family
   expressed concerns that her caretakers and her lawyers were pursuing
   the case based on their own financial interest. "My auntie would never,
   ever go to this length to hurt some young artists trying to make it in
   the world," Parks' niece Rhea McCauley said in an Associated Press
   interview. "As a family, our fear is that during her last days Auntie
   Rosa will be surrounded by strangers trying to make money off of her
   name."

   The lawsuit was settled April 15, 2005. In the settlement agreement,
   OutKast and their producers and record labels paid Parks an undisclosed
   cash settlement and agreed to work with the Rosa and Raymond Parks
   Institute for Self Development in creating educational programs about
   the life of Rosa Parks. The record labels and OutKast admitted to no
   wrongdoing. It is not known whether Parks' legal fees were paid for
   from her settlement money or by the record companies.

Death and funeral

   Rosa Parks resided in Detroit until she died at the age of 92 on
   October 24, 2005, at about 19:00 EDT, in her apartment on the east side
   of the city. She had been diagnosed with progressive dementia in 2004.

   City officials in Montgomery and Detroit announced on October 27 that
   the front seats of their city buses would be reserved with black
   ribbons in honour of Parks until her funeral. Parks' coffin was flown
   to Montgomery, Alabama and taken in a horse-drawn hearse to the St.
   Paul African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church, where she lay in repose
   at the altar, dressed in the uniform of a church deaconess, on October
   29. A memorial service was held there the following morning, and one of
   the speakers, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, said that if it had
   not been for Rosa Parks, she would probably have never become the
   Secretary of State. In the evening the casket was transported to
   Washington, D.C. and taken, aboard a bus similar to the one in which
   she made her protest, to lay in honour in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda
   (making her the first woman and second African American ever to receive
   this honour). An estimated 50,000 people viewed the casket there, and
   the event was broadcast on television on October 31. This was followed
   by another memorial service at a different St. Paul AME church in
   Washington on the afternoon of October 31. For two days, she lay in
   repose at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in
   Detroit, Michigan.

   Parks' funeral service, seven hours long, was held on Wednesday,
   November 2, at the Greater Grace Temple Church. After the funeral
   service, an honour guard from the Michigan National Guard laid the U.S.
   flag over the casket and carried it to a horse-drawn hearse, which had
   been intended to carry it, in daylight, to the cemetery. As the hearse
   passed the thousands of people who had turned out to view the
   procession, many clapped and released white balloons. Rosa was interred
   between her husband and mother at Detroit's Woodlawn Cemetery in the
   chapel's mausoleum. (The chapel was renamed the Rosa L. Parks Freedom
   Chapel just after her death.) Parks had previously prepared and placed
   a headstone on the selected location with the inscription "Rosa L.
   Parks, wife, 1913–".

Awards and honours

   Rosa Parks with the NAACP's highest award, the Spingarn Medal, in 1979.
   Enlarge
   Rosa Parks with the NAACP's highest award, the Spingarn Medal, in 1979.
   The Rosa Parks Congressional Gold Medal bears the legend "Mother of the
   Modern Day Civil Rights Movement".
   The Rosa Parks Congressional Gold Medal bears the legend "Mother of the
   Modern Day Civil Rights Movement".

   Parks received most of her national accolades very late in life, with
   relatively few awards and honours being given to her until many decades
   after the Montgomery Bus Boycott. In 1979, the National Association for
   the Advancement of Colored People awarded Parks the Spingarn Medal, its
   highest honour, and she received the Martin Luther King Sr. Award the
   next year. She was inducted into the Michigan Women's Hall of Fame in
   1983 for her achievements in civil rights. In 1990, she was called at
   the last moment to be part of the group welcoming Nelson Mandela, who
   had just been released from his imprisonment in South Africa. Upon
   spotting her in the reception line, Mandela called out her name and,
   hugging her, said, "You sustained me while I was in prison all those
   years."

   Parks received the Rosa Parks Peace Prize in 1994 in Stockholm, Sweden.
   On September 9, 1996, President Bill Clinton presented Parks with the
   Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honour given by the U.S.
   executive branch. In 1998, she became the first recipient of the
   International Freedom Conductor Award given by the National Underground
   Railroad Freedom Centre. The next year, Parks was awarded the
   Congressional Gold Medal, the highest award given by the U.S.
   legislative branch and also received the Detroit-Windsor International
   Freedom Festival Freedom Award. Parks was a guest of President Bill
   Clinton during his 1999 State of the Union Address. Also that year,
   Time magazine named Parks one of the 20 most influential and iconic
   figures of the twentieth century. In 2000, her home state awarded her
   the Alabama Academy of Honor, as well as the first Governor's Medal of
   Honour for Extraordinary Courage. She was also awarded two dozen
   honorary doctorates from universities worldwide, and was made an
   honorary member of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority.
   Rosa Parks and U.S. President Bill Clinton
   Enlarge
   Rosa Parks and U.S. President Bill Clinton

   The Rosa Parks Library and Museum on the campus of Troy University in
   Montgomery, Alabama, was dedicated to her on December 1, 2000. It is
   located on the corner where Parks boarded the famed bus. The most
   popular items in the museum are the interactive bus arrest of Mrs.
   Parks and a sculpture of Parks sitting on a bus bench. The documentary
   "Mighty Times: The Legacy of Rosa Parks" received a 2002 nomination for
   Academy Award for Documentary Short Subject. She also collaborated that
   year in a TV movie of her life starring Angela Bassett.

   The United States Senate passed a resolution on October 27, 2005 to
   honour Parks by allowing her body to lie in honour in the U.S. Capitol
   Rotunda. The House of Representatives approved the resolution on
   October 28. Since the founding of the practice of lying in state in the
   Rotunda in 1852, Parks was the 31st person, the first woman, the first
   American who had not been a U.S. government official, and the second
   non-government official (after Frenchman Pierre L'Enfant). She was also
   the second black person to lie in state, after Jacob Chestnut, one of
   the two United States Capitol Police officers who were fatally shot by
   Russell Eugene Weston Jr. on July 24, 1998. Former President Ronald
   Reagan was the last person to lie in state in the Rotunda, in 2004.

   On October 30, President George W. Bush issued a Proclamation ordering
   that all flags on US public areas both within the country and abroad be
   flown at half-staff on the day of Parks' funeral.
   The No. 2857 (GM serial number 1132, coach ID #2857) bus, which Rosa
   Parks was riding on before she was arrested, is now a museum exhibit at
   the Henry Ford Museum.
   Enlarge
   The No. 2857 (GM serial number 1132, coach ID #2857) bus, which Rosa
   Parks was riding on before she was arrested, is now a museum exhibit at
   the Henry Ford Museum.

   Metro Transit in King County, Washington placed stickers dedicating the
   first forward-facing seat of all its buses in Parks' memory shortly
   after her death, and the American Public Transportation Association
   declared December 1, 2005, the 50th anniversary of her arrest, to be a
   "National Transit Tribute to Rosa Parks Day". On that anniversary,
   President George W. Bush signed H. R. 4145, directing that a statue of
   Parks be placed in the United States Capitol's National Statuary Hall.
   In signing the resolution directing the Joint Commission on the Library
   to do so, the President stated:


   Rosa Parks

       By placing her statue in the heart of the nation's Capitol, we
   commemorate her work for a more perfect union, and we commit ourselves
           to continue to struggle for justice for every American.


   Rosa Parks

   On February 5, 2006, at Super Bowl XL, played at Detroit's Ford Field,
   the late Coretta Scott King and Parks, who had been a long-time
   resident of "The Motor City", were remembered and honored by a moment
   of silence. It was noted that the honour was to show respect for two
   women who had "helped make the nation as a whole great."
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