Post by HitsvilleSoul on Oct 25, 2005 12:26:03 GMT -5
WASHINGTON (AFP) - Rosa Parks, the petite black seamstress whose defiance aboard a city bus nearly 50 years ago sparked the US civil rights movement and helped Martin Luther King Junior gain national prominence, died Monday at the age of 92 at her home in Detroit, Michigan.
The cause of death was listed as "hypertension and dementia," Albert Samuels, chief investigator for the Wayne County, Michigan medical examiner's office, told AFP, noting that the findings still had to be certified by Parks's doctor.
"She went away peacefully," longtime friend and spokeswoman Elaine Eason Steele told the Detroit Free Press.
Born February 4, 1913 in Tuskegee, Alabama, Parks was one of the first women to join the Montgomery chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and served as the group's secretary from 1943 to 1956.
When black leaders in Montgomery, Alabama's profoundly segregated capital were eager to launch a boycott of city buses to protest the local ordinance barring blacks from sitting with whites, Parks allowed them to use her arrest as the catalyst.
On December 1, 1955, Parks was jailed and fined 14 dollars for refusing to give up her seat in the middle of the bus to a white man who wanted to sit in her row.
At that time, front rows were for whites only, and blacks had to abandon their seats in other rows when all front-row seats were taken and whites were left standing.
Her arrest launched the 382-day Montgomery bus boycott that ran from December 5, 1955 to December 20, 1956. During that time, black workers walked to their jobs or paid black-owned taxi companies 10 cents -- the same amount as the bus fare -- to get to work.
Blacks were inspired to stay off the buses at weekly and sometimes twice-weekly church services, where their aching souls were soothed by freedom songs and their aching feet were swayed by stirring sermons.
It helped, too, that news coverage attracted worldwide attention, including enough money to finance a separate transportation system made up of a fleet of station wagons assigned to various churches and augmented by black cab drivers, black car owners and whites who either supported their cause or simply needed to get their black employees to and from work.
Although the movement was non-violent, the white response was not. Parks left Montgomery for Detroit in 1957, after continuing death threats.
The protest ended only after the US Supreme Court ruled on November 13, 1956 that segregation on city buses was unconstitutional. That ruling encouraged others to seek an end to racial injustice around the country.
The boycott was led by Martin Luther King Junior, then a 27-year-old Baptist minister in Montgomery. King's success as president of the Montgomery Improvement Association established the future Nobel Peace Prize winner as a national civil rights figure.
From 1967 to 1988, Parks worked on the Detroit staff of Democratic Representative John Conyers (news, bio, voting record). She received the NAACP's Spingarn Medal in 1979 for her achievements in civil rights. And she went on to receive the prestigious Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1996 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 1999.
In August 1994, at the age of 81, Parks was beaten and robbed of about 50 dollars in her Detroit house by a man reportedly seeking money to buy crack cocaine. She was treated for bruises.
She also settled a lawsuit earlier this year with the hip-hop group Outkast, following a years-long dispute over the group's use of her name in a song.
The 1998 tune, dubbed "Rosa Parks," featured the controversial line "Ah ha, hush that fuss, everybody move to the back of the bus."
Parks's health had been declining since the late 1990s. By then, she had stopped giving interviews and rarely appeared in public.
Representative John Lewis (news, bio, voting record) of Georgia, a prominent figure in the civil rights movement, paid homage to her, telling CNN: "By sitting down, she was really standing up for all Americans."
"For more than 381 days, people walked the streets rather than ride segregated buses. They organized carpools. Rosa Parks's action inspired a mass non-violent movement, a movement of massive resistance against segregation and racial discrimination, not only in public transportation," Lewis said.
"Rosa Parks served as an inspiration to generations of African-Americans and all people of good will," Bruce Gordon, president and chief executive of the NAACP, said in a statement. "More than an icon, Mrs. Parks is symbolic of the thousands of courageous NAACP workers who fight for civil rights in their communities."
It had been widely reported over the years that Parks had said she was too tired to move from her seat after a day's work as a seamstress in a downtown Montgomery department store.
But in the autobiography "Rosa Parks: My Story," published in 1992, the woman known as the mother of the civil rights movement explained that it was not fatigue from a day's work that had prompted her to stay seated in 1955.
"The only tired I was, was tired of giving in," Parks declared.
The cause of death was listed as "hypertension and dementia," Albert Samuels, chief investigator for the Wayne County, Michigan medical examiner's office, told AFP, noting that the findings still had to be certified by Parks's doctor.
"She went away peacefully," longtime friend and spokeswoman Elaine Eason Steele told the Detroit Free Press.
Born February 4, 1913 in Tuskegee, Alabama, Parks was one of the first women to join the Montgomery chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and served as the group's secretary from 1943 to 1956.
When black leaders in Montgomery, Alabama's profoundly segregated capital were eager to launch a boycott of city buses to protest the local ordinance barring blacks from sitting with whites, Parks allowed them to use her arrest as the catalyst.
On December 1, 1955, Parks was jailed and fined 14 dollars for refusing to give up her seat in the middle of the bus to a white man who wanted to sit in her row.
At that time, front rows were for whites only, and blacks had to abandon their seats in other rows when all front-row seats were taken and whites were left standing.
Her arrest launched the 382-day Montgomery bus boycott that ran from December 5, 1955 to December 20, 1956. During that time, black workers walked to their jobs or paid black-owned taxi companies 10 cents -- the same amount as the bus fare -- to get to work.
Blacks were inspired to stay off the buses at weekly and sometimes twice-weekly church services, where their aching souls were soothed by freedom songs and their aching feet were swayed by stirring sermons.
It helped, too, that news coverage attracted worldwide attention, including enough money to finance a separate transportation system made up of a fleet of station wagons assigned to various churches and augmented by black cab drivers, black car owners and whites who either supported their cause or simply needed to get their black employees to and from work.
Although the movement was non-violent, the white response was not. Parks left Montgomery for Detroit in 1957, after continuing death threats.
The protest ended only after the US Supreme Court ruled on November 13, 1956 that segregation on city buses was unconstitutional. That ruling encouraged others to seek an end to racial injustice around the country.
The boycott was led by Martin Luther King Junior, then a 27-year-old Baptist minister in Montgomery. King's success as president of the Montgomery Improvement Association established the future Nobel Peace Prize winner as a national civil rights figure.
From 1967 to 1988, Parks worked on the Detroit staff of Democratic Representative John Conyers (news, bio, voting record). She received the NAACP's Spingarn Medal in 1979 for her achievements in civil rights. And she went on to receive the prestigious Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1996 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 1999.
In August 1994, at the age of 81, Parks was beaten and robbed of about 50 dollars in her Detroit house by a man reportedly seeking money to buy crack cocaine. She was treated for bruises.
She also settled a lawsuit earlier this year with the hip-hop group Outkast, following a years-long dispute over the group's use of her name in a song.
The 1998 tune, dubbed "Rosa Parks," featured the controversial line "Ah ha, hush that fuss, everybody move to the back of the bus."
Parks's health had been declining since the late 1990s. By then, she had stopped giving interviews and rarely appeared in public.
Representative John Lewis (news, bio, voting record) of Georgia, a prominent figure in the civil rights movement, paid homage to her, telling CNN: "By sitting down, she was really standing up for all Americans."
"For more than 381 days, people walked the streets rather than ride segregated buses. They organized carpools. Rosa Parks's action inspired a mass non-violent movement, a movement of massive resistance against segregation and racial discrimination, not only in public transportation," Lewis said.
"Rosa Parks served as an inspiration to generations of African-Americans and all people of good will," Bruce Gordon, president and chief executive of the NAACP, said in a statement. "More than an icon, Mrs. Parks is symbolic of the thousands of courageous NAACP workers who fight for civil rights in their communities."
It had been widely reported over the years that Parks had said she was too tired to move from her seat after a day's work as a seamstress in a downtown Montgomery department store.
But in the autobiography "Rosa Parks: My Story," published in 1992, the woman known as the mother of the civil rights movement explained that it was not fatigue from a day's work that had prompted her to stay seated in 1955.
"The only tired I was, was tired of giving in," Parks declared.