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A statue of civil rights icon Rosa Parks, who refused to give up her seat to a white man on a bus in segregated Alabama in 1955, has been unveiled at the US Capitol. President Barack Obama helped unveil the statue, saying Mrs Parks had taken her rightful place among those who have shaped the course of US history. Mrs Parks was arrested for not giving up her seat, triggering the Montgomery bus boycott that brought a young clergyman, the Reverand Martin Luther King Jr, to national prominence as a civil rights leader.
She died in 2005 aged 92, and becomes the first black woman to be honoured with a full-length statue in the Capitol's Statuary Hall. Her statue joins a bust of another black woman, abolitionist Sojourner Truth, which sits in the Capitol Visitors Centre. Mrs Parks was an educated woman who recalled seeing her grandfather sitting on the porch steps with a gun during the height of white violence against blacks in Alabama, after the First World War.
In 1900, Montgomery had passed a city ordinance (essentially only whites could vote) to segregate bus passengers by race. Conductors were empowered to assign seats to achieve that goal. According to the law, no passenger would be required to move or give up his seat and stand if the bus was crowded and no other seats were available. Over time and by custom, however, Montgomery bus drivers adopted the practice of requiring black riders to move when there were no white-only seats left.
One day in 1943, Mrs. Parks boarded the bus and paid the fare. She then moved to her seat but driver James F. Blake told her to follow city rules and enter the bus again from the back door. Parks exited the bus, but before she could re-board at the rear door, Blake drove off, leaving her to walk home in the rain.
After working all day, Parks boarded the Cleveland Avenue bus 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.
Near the middle of the bus, her row was directly behind the ten seats reserved for white passengers. Initially, she did not notice that the bus driver was the same man, James F. Blake, who had left her in the rain in 1943. As the bus travelled 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 Theater, and several white passengers boarded.
Driver Blake noted that the front of the bus was filled with white passengers, with two or three standing. He 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 redesignated coloured section. Blake said, "Why don't you stand up?" Parks responded, "I don't think I should have to stand up." When the driver saw her still sitting, he asked if she was going to stand up, and she said, 'No, I'm not.' And the driver said, 'Well, if you don't stand up, I'm going to have to call the police and have you arrested.' She said, 'You may do that.'
When Parks refused to give up her seat, Blake called the police to arrest Parks. As the police officer took her away, she recalled that she asked, "Why do you push us around?" She remembered the police saying, "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, although technically she had not taken a white-only seat; she had been in a coloured section. She was bailed out of jail the next evening. Mrs. Parks was not the first person to resist bus segregation, but was the best candidate for seeing through a court challenge after her arrest for civil disobedience in violating Alabama segregation laws though eventually her case became bogged down in the state courts.
After the bus boycott, Mrs Parks and her husband lost their jobs and were threatened. They left for Detroit, where she was an activist against the war in Vietnam and worked on poverty, housing and racial justice issues, said Jeanne Theoharis, author of the new biography "The Rebellious Life of Mrs Rosa Parks".
Mrs Parks was honoured previously in Washington with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1996 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 1999, both during the Bill Clinton administration.
The No. 2857 bus on which Mrs Parks was riding before her arrest (a GM "old-look" transit bus, serial number 1132), is now a museum exhibit at the Henry Ford Museum
More on: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa_Parks
