Posted on 10/24/2005 6:58:25 PM PDT by jmc1969
Civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks has died, Local 4 has learned.
Parks, 92, reportedly died around 7 p.m. Monday at St. John Hospital on Detroit's east side.
Parks' refusal to give up her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery, Ala., in 1955 landed her in jail and sparked a bus boycott that is considered the start of the modern civil rights movement. The bus is on display at the Henry Ford Museum, Dearborn.
Parks, was born on Feb. 4, 1913, in Tuskegee, Ala. She lived in Detroit.
You keep on keeping on. Same spirit the pioneers had. We still have it and it will abide with us in the times ahead.
LOL! Not surprised.
Kwame has stated that Detroit is the comeback city of the world.
Don't know.
On a side note, the rear of a bus is generally the safest. Most fatalities that occur on buses, usually occur on the front half of the bus. I prefer to sit in the rear, near the rear exit. Of course, I haven't had to use a bus since the military, and hopefully will never have to again.
You ask why? Conventional wisdom (which it isn't) and ignorance of inconvenient facts cannot be questioned in our politically corrected culture! Here or anywhere. Sad.
I have posted about Rosa here before. Her death saddens me but I find a jewel of info about her past that brings back other memories. I read in Rueter's ONE SENTENCE COVERAGE that Rosa was a seamstress. My grandmother was a seamstress in Atlanta at this time. A black co-worker came to work bruised from a beating by her drunken husband one too many times. My grandfather, a member of the local KKK didn't like the way it affected my grandmother so he and some friends loaded a white horse on a trailer behind an old Chevy pickup and drove by the wife-beater's house on Sunday morning when the wife was at church. Hubby was drinking on the porch steps and a shout from the truck told him he would be " riding this white horse " if he hit his wife again. My grandmother and her friend were never told about this event but the black seamstress later remarked what a wonderful change had come over her husband - no beatings and he had even stopped drinking all together.
I abhore all things KKK then and particularly now with it's alliance with Nazism but like the NAACP - some things get taken over by self-serving lower case trash and used for self-promotion. Have you noticed how much press was given to Dr. King's wife when she became ill ? No woman has advanced human rights with the dignity of Rosa Parks except Princess Dianna and Mother Teresa. But that's another story ........
And Rosa gets one sentence coverage by Reuters.
This is a blue sky moment.
She did right as surely as the sky is blue and you
sound like a fool to advocate otherwise.
Rest in Peace Ms. Parks...
Civil Rights Pioneer Rosa Parks Dies at 92
Associated Press
DETROIT (AP) -- Rosa Lee Parks, whose refusal to give up her bus seat to a white man sparked the modern civil rights movement, died Monday. She was 92.
Mrs. Parks died at her home of natural causes, said Karen Morgan, a spokeswoman for U.S. Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich.
Mrs. Parks was 42 when she committed an act of defiance in 1955 that was to change the course of American history and earn her the title "mother of the civil rights movement."
At that time, Jim Crow laws in place since the post-Civil War Reconstruction required separation of the races in buses, restaurants and public accommodations throughout the South, while legally sanctioned racial discrimination kept blacks out of many jobs and neighborhoods in the North.
The Montgomery, Ala., seamstress, an active member of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, was riding on a city bus Dec. 1, 1955, when a white man demanded her seat.
Mrs. Parks refused, despite rules requiring blacks to yield their seats to whites. Two black Montgomery women had been arrested earlier that year on the same charge, but Mrs. Parks was jailed. She also was fined $14.
Speaking in 1992, she said history too often maintains "that my feet were hurting and I didn't know why I refused to stand up when they told me. But the real reason of my not standing up was I felt that I had a right to be treated as any other passenger. We had endured that kind of treatment for too long."
Her arrest triggered a 381-day boycott of the bus system organized by a then little-known Baptist minister, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who later earned the Nobel Peace Prize for his work.
"At the time I was arrested I had no idea it would turn into this," Mrs. Parks said 30 years later. "It was just a day like any other day. The only thing that made it significant was that the masses of the people joined in."
The Montgomery bus boycott, which came one year after the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark declaration that separate schools for blacks and whites were "inherently unequal," marked the start of the modern civil rights movement.
The movement culminated in the 1964 federal Civil Rights Act, which banned racial discrimination in public accommodations.
After taking her public stand for civil rights, Mrs. Parks had trouble finding work in Alabama. Amid threats and harassment, she and her husband Raymond moved to Detroit in 1957. She worked as an aide in Conyers' Detroit office from 1965 until retiring Sept. 30, 1988. Raymond Parks died in 1977.
Mrs. Parks became a revered figure in Detroit, where a street and middle school were named for her and a papier-mache likeness of her was featured in the city's Thanksgiving Day Parade.
Mrs. Parks said upon retiring from her job with Conyers that she wanted to devote more time to the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development. The institute, incorporated in 1987, is devoted to developing leadership among Detroit's young people and initiating them into the struggle for civil rights.
"Rosa Parks: My Story" was published in February 1992. In 1994 she brought out "Quiet Strength: The Faith, the Hope and the Heart of a Woman Who Changed a Nation," and in 1996 a collection of letters called "Dear Mrs. Parks: A Dialogue With Today's Youth."
She was among the civil rights leaders who addressed the Million Man March in October 1995.
In 1996, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, awarded to civilians making outstanding contributions to American life. In 1999, she was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, the nation's highest civilian honor.
Mrs. Parks received dozens of other awards, ranging from induction into the Alabama Academy of Honor to an NAACP Image Award for her 1999 appearance on CBS' "Touched by an Angel."
The Rosa Parks Library and Museum opened in November 2000 in Montgomery. The museum features a 1955-era bus and a video that recreates the conversation that preceded Parks' arrest.
"Are you going to stand up?" the bus driver asked.
"No," Parks answered.
"Well, by God, I'm going to have you arrested," the driver said.
"You may do that," Parks responded.
Mrs. Parks' later years were not without difficult moments.
In 1994, Mrs. Parks' home was invaded by a 28-year-old man who beat her and took $53. She was treated at a hospital and released. The man, Joseph Skipper, pleaded guilty, blaming the crime on his drug problem.
The Parks Institute struggled financially since its inception. The charity's principal activity - the annual Pathways to Freedom bus tour taking students to the sites of key events in the civil rights movement - routinely cost more money than the institute could raise.
Mrs. Parks lost a 1999 lawsuit that sought to prevent the hip-hop duo OutKast from using her name as the title of a Grammy-nominated song. In 2000, she threatened legal action against an Oklahoma man who planned to auction Internet domain name rights to .
After losing the OutKast lawsuit, attorney Gregory Reed, who represented Mrs. Parks, said his client "has once again suffered the pains of exploitation." A later suit against OutKast's record company was settled out of court.
She was born Rosa Louise McCauley on Feb. 4, 1913, in Tuskegee, Ala. Family illness interrupted her high school education, but after she married Raymond Parks in 1932, he encouraged her and she earned a diploma in 1934. He also inspired her to become involved in the NAACP.
Looking back in 1988, Mrs. Parks said she worried that black young people took legal equality for granted.
Older blacks, she said "have tried to shield young people from what we have suffered. And in so doing, we seem to have a more complacent attitude.
"We must double and redouble our efforts to try to say to our youth, to try to give them an inspiration, an incentive and the will to study our heritage and to know what it means to be black in America today."
At a celebration in her honor that same year, she said: "I am leaving this legacy to all of you ... to bring peace, justice, equality, love and a fulfillment of what our lives should be. Without vision, the people will perish, and without courage and inspiration, dreams will die - the dream of freedom and peace."
Nonsense!
I work with one. He's a dad and says he became a staunch conservative Republican when he had kids and started "living and working in the real world" as he puts it. He's trying to convert the several black Dems at the office.
I asked you about Whittaker Chambers, Eldridge Cleaver and David Horowitz. But don't let inconvenient facts get in your way - just keep ignoring them.
May she rest in peace after living many years to see the fullness of her actions in refusing to give up her seat.
An important concept I learned over the last few short years, which actually comes from Luke 10:29-63 (the parable of the Good Samaritan).
In the parable a Lawyer (a teacher/expert in the laws of Moses) asks Christ who his neighbor was. And Christ went ahead to give the parable of how a man was waylaid by robbers and left for dead by the side of the road.
The first person to come by was a priest, who the bible says was riding (aparently a donkey, horse ....something). He could have helped the person, but he didn't.
The next person was a Levite (Levites were descendants of Levi and helped priests serve the Lord in the temple). Did he help the wounded man? No, he kept hsi distance, and walked on.
The third person to walk by was a Samaritan. Now, this was the worst type of person to come by ...at least for a wounded Jew. Samaritans were anathema for Jews, and it was 'unclean' to even eat anything touched by them (actually in John 4:9 Christ is asked by the Samaritan woman by the well how come he is not troubled asking for a drink of water from a Samaritan woman). In essence Samaritans were despised by the Jews, and on their part they despised the Jews, and thus there was really no chance of any help coming from the Samaritan.
HOWEVER it was the Samaritan who picked up the wounded man.
It was the Samaritan who bandaged and tended his wounds with oil and wine (which is a subtle hit at the priest and the Levite, since they poured oil and wine in the temple to the Lord, yet wouldn't help their fellow man dying by the road....in Jewish tradition that is a slap to the face of the priest and Levite).
It was the Samaritan who put the wounded Jew on his beast and transported him to an inn.
And it was the Samaritan who paid the inn-keeper money to tend for the man, and then even added that when he came back he would pay any extra that was necssary.
The Samaritan.
And in verse 63 Christ says the following:"Which of these three do you think proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell into the robbers' hands?"
Basically it boils down to this. Rosa PArks was a true American hero. Was she a communist? I do not know about that, and to be honest I couldn't care a whit less about that. She could have been the co-writer of Marxist doctrine and I wouldn't even notice THAT!
And why?
Well, because there were very very very very many people ....millions in fact .....who could have done something, anything, to rectify some of the injustices that were going on back then, but they did nothing. Rosa Parks was by no means the only person who stood up. There were many more, of all races (some, again of all races, who paid for it with their lives). But myriads more did nothing.
Hence I cannot with good conscience try to dab the woman with 'she was a communist tab' when she did what many more should have done. Communist or not, man or woman, black or white, she was, and will always be, a true American hero.
And a true neighbor.
Save me a seat on the bus.
Condolences to Rosa Parks' family and friends.
I wonder how long it will take before Mother Moonbeam tries to capitalize off of the death of Rosa Parks.I'm sure that Cindy has been planning for this day ever since she was called the Rosa Parks of todays antiwar movement.That ridiculous comparison will be more than enough to send Cindy on another grave robbing expedition.There's a good chance we might see her standing on top of Rosa's coffin as it's being lowered into the ground while wearing a red dress and her son's beige military boots.She might even use Rosa's cemetery plot as the new ditch for Camp Casey.
She was a true hero of that era; it's just a shame that the movement she helped to launch got hijacked by hustlers like Al $harpton, Je$$e Jack$on and Louis "Beam Me Up" Farrakhan.
It's apparently past Drudge's bedtime.
Thank you for your post, jmc1969. Rest in peace, Rosa Parks. Your place in history is reserved at the "front of the bus".
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