Posted on 10/29/2005 7:10:30 PM PDT by Colonel Kangaroo
A closed casket bearing the body of Rosa Parks will be placed on a platform for public viewing inside the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol building. U.S. Senate historian Richard Baker says Rosa Parks is the first private citizen in the United States to be accorded the honor...
(Excerpt) Read more at voanews.com ...
Or earlier political associations for that matter... it was a set-up of a person deemed to be more sympathetic than some other black persons who previously got in trouble with the bus seat law. Somehow this never comes out in the standard Parks interviews or news coverages. Not that it makes the bus seat law or Jim Crow laws any less wrong, but it's a pity that political correctness has required the utter suppression of major parts of the story.
Thank God she used civil disobedience, and Martin Luther King picked up on that.
Had the more violent forces prevailed and a race war begun, it would have been bloody and probably tens of millions of human beings would have died in the process.
Race war (see Rwanda for example) is like a fire that once started, does not quench easily.
She sued the band Outkast for using her name in a song they wrote to honor her.
You aren't serious i hope. Comparing the racial tension in the United States to the millions of people that were slaughtered with machetes is pretty lame.
Thats in rather poor taste
I'd read that before, and have no reason to doubt it....Don't care. It was something that had to be done, and we are a better nation for having done it.
If she was vetted and selected to force the issue, so what? I don't think people would think any less of her or the cause because of that. If it took a squeaky clean person to test the issue, then that says more about the people who would have used any tiny excuse they could find to blacken the subject's name rather than face up to the fact that their society was institutionally racist than it does about the civil rights activists.
I agree with you. Amazing isn't it? Just amazing.
Yes but I can see himlaughing and smiling til hs sees t.v. cameras on him then him wiping a tear away. Phony pervert.
--- You aren't serious i hope. Comparing the racial tension in the United States to the millions of people that were slaughtered with machetes is pretty lame. ---
Race war is something you don't even want to think about. It requires no ryhme or reason for killing and grows like a fire.
Imagine the Watts riots only instead of being in Watts, they are taking place in Beverly Hills and people are being dragged out of their homes and killed. Whites, threatened with such a scene, start killing blacks indiscriminately.
Yes, I was serious. We are fortunate that our racial problems were solved non-violently.
so who is going to drag the people in Beverly Hills out of their homes and kill them? I can assure you that that dog won't hunt in Texas. I don't care who is trying to attack who...we are a nation of armed citizens and no sane person of any nationality is going to condone or allow that type of behavior. Comparing the social tension in the sixties to the massacre of millions of Hutus is a terrible comparison. Racial tension in this country was never at a level that even approaches some of the atrocities that we have seen time and again in African nations. I don't accept your notion that we were on the brink of a race war in the United States but for the staged press conference of Rosa Parks. They have a term for this...it is called revisionist history. I am not knocking the Civil Rights movement because it definitely brought about necessary changes in thinking and attitudes. I just wonder why the more radical leaders of the sixties rail relentlessly about a white man that is to this day still trying to keep them down? Why is it ok to assume that all white males are related to plantation owners when my family didn't even immigrate to the United States until 1900? Why were these same leaders so tireless about seeking reparations for slavery from Washington while doing and saying nothing about the slave trade that existed openly in the Yucatan peninsula until the 1970's? it is a litte inconsistent if you ask me.
Rotunda viewing is traditionally reserved for Presidents, Senators, high government officials, and military heroes. That is fact. Rosa Parks deserves this honor as much as I deserve this honor - or any Freeper deserves this honor. We don't deserve this honor, and neither does she.
This will only serve to cheapen what is means to lie in state in the Rotunda.
Since you know, and I know, that she collaborated to intentionally set up a test case, then how is it being suppressed? It's not suppressed, we all know that. It's just not the main point of the story. History has accepted that hers was a cause that needed fighting, and her role in it is remembered.
I can actually sympathize with your point, that you feel cheated when protests are organized and planned, rather than being truly spontaneous acts of individuals. But truly spontaneous acts lack the planning to ensure they are reported, and fail to carry the backup and support of an organization ready to fight it.
I'm reminded of a group of men somewhere in a state that is fighting for concealed carry of weapons who openly wore sidearms to a cafe in a town where concealed carry was being debated. To openly carry is literally legal, but never done, and they knew would cause a huge stir, which is why they planned and did it. We argued about it here and I even took the side, for a time, that because it was a setup, their situation was artificial and less compelling. I later took that back. It's an organized civil disobedience to make a point. That's how tides turn in this country.
I can already see Billy Clinton focusing the limelight on himself at the Rotunda.
Nonsense.
The very fact that everyone knows who she is without needing to be reminded shows her impact and her appropriately elevated place in our history, and our rotunda.
I agree. She was a unique woman with a singular place in our country's history. We all owe her gratitude and respect.
I do not think this cheapens what it means to lie in state in the Rotunda. If anything, it elevates it.
I wonder if political correctness and political expediency played a major role in deciding on the Rotunda.
This historical building will now become the "funeral parlor" for anyone the politicians deem worthy. Will they so honor every serviceman who is killed in the fight to keep America free?Really, was Rosa Parks braver than those who go into combat?
IMO this decision was wrong.
Can you also envision the long, long line of the duped or stupid waiting to file by?
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