Tribute to Rosa Louise Parks

Floor Speech

TRIBUTE TO ROSA LOUISE PARKS

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I join others the world over in mourning the death and giving thanks for the life of Mrs. Rosa Parks. Someone once said that in the instance Rosa Parks refused to move, somewhere in the universe a gear in the machinery shifted. Jim Crow had finally met his match.

Rosa Parks was an accomplished seamstress who helped us all see that America's great strength is the fact that we are one cloth sewn together in a splendid coat of many colors. It is often reported that Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus that day in Montgomery, AL, because her feet were tired.

That was not so. She said many times:

I was not physically tired--or no more than I usually was at the end of a working day. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.

It would be more than a year before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Montgomery's segregated buses were unconstitutional.

To this day, the Montgomery bus boycott remains the largest and most successful act of civil disobedience in the history of the United States of America, all inspired by this simple, courageous woman. For 381 days, tens of thousands of hard-working middle class, lower class, and all classes of African Americans walked miles to work every day in the heat, in the cold, in the rain. Many of the boycotters, including Mrs. Parks and her husband Raymond, lost their jobs, but they never lost their faith. They persevered with courage and with dignity.

In the end, they did not just change the law; they changed our Nation, and they changed the world. The image of Rosa Parks sitting quietly on that bus waiting to be arrested is etched forever in our national consciousness, but it is not simply refusing to give up her seat that made Rosa Parks so great. It was a refusal to give up hope, especially her hope in young people.

In 1955, Mrs. Parks was the leader of the Montgomery NAACP local youth organization. It is one of the lesser known parts of her story that the evening she was arrested she was in the process of rejuvenating that youth group. Her dedication to the next generation is the reason she founded the Raymond and Rosa Parks Institute for Self-Development in Detroit, MI. Her faith was tested, but it was never broken.

After Mrs. Parks was robbed and beaten in her own home in 1992, she implored people ``not to read too much into the attack.''

``Young people need to be taught to respect and care for their elders.'' she said. ``Despite the violence and crime in our society, we should not let fear overwhelm us. We must remain strong. We must not give up hope; we can overcome.''

This morning's Detroit Free Press has a wonderful story on Mrs. Parks' life and legacy. In it, U.S. Appeals Court Judge Damon Keith, a longtime friend of Mrs. Parks, recalls when another living icon of freedom, Nelson Mandela, visited Detroit in 1990.

When he got off the plane, a long line of dignitaries was waiting to greet the great man. President Mandela scanned the line until his eyes rested on a tiny woman. ``He chanted Rosa, Rosa, Rosa Parks,'' Judge Keith recalls.

President Mandela told Mrs. Parks that she was his inspiration during the long years he was jailed on Robbins Island, and that her example had inspired South Africa's freedom fighters. Later, in a 1993 speech to the NAACP, Nelson Mandela called Rosa Parks ``the David who challenged Goliath.''

Ms. Johnnie Carr, Mrs. Parks' longtime friend, said Mrs. Parks always believed that the Montgomery bus boycott was ``ordained by God.'' It was meant to be. But it almost did not happen. In her autobiography, Mrs. Parks wrote that, had she not been so tired that day, she would have waited for the next bus, because she would have recognized the driver of the Number 7 bus as the same man who had put her off the bus years earlier for refusing to board through the back door.

On that earlier occasion, in 1943, Mrs. Parks had just tried, unsuccessfully, to register to vote. Twelve years later--the morning after the long Montgomery bus boycott ended--Mrs. Parks again boarded the Number 7 bus, paid her fare, and took her seat in the front of the bus. By coincidence--or perhaps by divine design--the bus driver that day was the same man who had called the police to have her arrested more than a year earlier. His name was James Blake. And he lived in a little town call Equality, GA.

The Detroit Free Press this morning quotes from one of the last interviews Rosa Parks gave. A decade ago, in an interview with that newspaper, Mrs. Parks was asked how she hoped to be remembered. She replied, ``I'd like people to say that I'm a person that always wanted to be free, and wanted it not only for myself--freedom for all human beings.''

That is a great tribute to a great lady who we remember today.

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