Posted on 10/26/2005 11:56:47 AM PDT by ZGuy
Officials, activists pay tribute to the late Rosa Parks
As she had in life, Rosa Parks stopped traffic Tuesday. This time, traffic slowed to honor her civil-rights legacy.
Along a stretch of the Santa Monica Freeway named after her, a handful of prominent black church leaders, politicians and community activists paid homage to the quiet and dignified seamstress who gave the nation pause in the cause for racial equality. Parks, 92, died of natural causes Monday at her home in Detroit.
Drivers honked horns and transit workers stopped as local politicians laid a wreath below a green Rosa Parks Freeway sign.
Parks' simple action - refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man in the segregationist South of 1955 - sparked the civil-rights movement, which gave rise to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
"Rosa Parks has reached a mountain top. ... She demonstrated one person can make a difference," said John Mack, former director of the Urban League of Los Angeles as he stood before the First AME, the church where the 92-year-old Parks worshipped when visiting Los Angeles.
At another remembrance ceremony along the Crenshaw Boulevard freeway overpass, community activists gathered to place a small pot of pink flowers, to tape photocopied pictures of Parks to the railing of the overpass and to sign a memorial card.
"The nation, the world, has lost a great, great figure," said Earl Ofari Hutchinson, a commentator who runs the Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundtable - a forum on black issues.
"We wanted to give people in the county - in Los Angeles - a place where they can go, where they can show their appreciation."
The First AME Church at 2270 Harvard Blvd. will hold a public memorial at 11 a.m. Friday.
There's an understatement.
I can't imagine anybody clueless enough to say "Shut down the Santa Monica Freeway at 5PM to honor her? Yep, that sounds like a good idea." Only in California. Only in California.
How about just shutting down a bus somewhere?
More BS....all the traffic reporters stated this caused a huge backup....but the politicians said everything was normal.
They are going to dry out the NO buses as a tribute.
At first the media was saying they planned to stop all lanes for ten minutes. I think that began to smell like yesterday's leftover fish, and it was decided to just close the slow lane so the wreath could be placed.
I think Rosa did a good thing and deserves to be honored. This isn't the way I would have thought showed respect and class.
Total idiots. Isn't denying persons the use of their freeway the same as denying Rosa Parks the use of her bus seat?
They shut down the I-10 during rush hour? Of all the things they could have done to honor Rosa Parks, this was the most idiotic, hairbrained thing. Can you imagine the expletives and the middle fingers going by? Whose idea was this?
She deserves better than that : (
That guy Nolan said he'd never seen anything like it in 25 years as a traffic reporter.
...just like Bill Clinton tied up air traffic for hours while getting haircut so he could feel good about himself...
Most of the LA freeways are so busy that (when they're not already jammed) any distraction to one driver will cause a slowdown that spreads across all lanes. Sometimes, this contributes to traffic accidents, too.
Stopping traffic briefly, even for a minute, can cause a terrible backlog in the system that can take an hour or more to clear. If it's during rush hour, that usually guarantees a jam for the rest of the rush hour period, and everybody will waste more time and fuel. Whoever planned this "tribute" was very inconsiderate.
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