Rosa Parks, civil rights heroine, is dead

From the Detroit Free Press: Rosa Parks, civil rights heroine, is dead

Parks' health had been declining since the late 1990s. She had stopped giving interviews by then and rarely appeared in public. When she did, she only smiled or spoke short, barely audible responses.

In one of her last lengthy interviews with the Detroit Free Press in 1995, she spoke of what she would like people to say about her after she passed away.

"I'd like people to say I'm a person who always wanted to be free and wanted it not only for myself; freedom is for all human beings," she said during an interview from the pastor's study of St. Matthew African Methodist Episcopal Church, a small congregation she joined upon moving to Detroit in 1957.

The following is from the Wikipedia article on Rosa Parks:

Standard accounts of Parks' act of civil disobedience in 1955 refer to her simply as a "tired seamstress." Parks stated in her autobiography, My Story, that it was not true that she was physically tired but was "tired of giving in."

Also, some accounts downplay her prior involvement with the NAACP and the Highlander Folk School, portraying her as an individual with no particular political background or training.

Many accounts fail to clarify: she was sitting in the "colored" section of the bus. With the "white" section full, a white man wanted her to give up her seat. That is, it was not a matter of protest on any level when she sat down; the protest was in her refusal to give up a seat in the "colored" section.

This part I only learned recently. I think it is important for people to be aware that Rosa Parks did not just haplessly find herself in this situation, but she made a conscious choice, agreeing to become the "face of the civil rights movement".

The NAACP had additionally considered but rejected some earlier protesters deemed unable or unsuitable to withstand the pressure of a legal challenge to segregation laws (see Claudette Colvin and Mary Louise Smith). The selection of Parks for a test case supported by the NAACP has been speculated to be in part because she was employed by the NAACP.

Thank you, Rosa, for your inspiring example of courage.

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