Honoring the Life of and Expressing Condolences of the Senate on the Passing of Rosa Parks
HONORING THE LIFE OF AND EXPRESSING CONDOLENCES OF THE SENATE ON THE PASSING OF ROSA PARKS --
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Ms. CANTWELL. Mr. President, I rise tonight to honor the life of Rosa Parks.
Let's ask an impossible question: Who was Rosa Parks?
Rosa Parks was a seamstress. She was a community organizer. She was an activist and a leader. Rosa Parks was a carpenter's daughter and a barber's wife. She was a hero of the civil rights movement. She was a trusted Congressional aide and a respected youth development expert.
And of course, Rosa Parks was the inspiring protagonist of a stirring American tale. Protest, reform, and reinvention marked the early pages of her great human story. On December 1, 1955, on a bus in Montgomery, AL, Rosa Parks, a black woman, refused to stand up and give her seat to a white man. She was arrested, tried, convicted, and fined for her act of civil disobedience in less than a week. The citywide boycott inspired by her actions would last more than a year. The full impact of those events would change a nation, last a lifetime, and reach far beyond.
Rosa Parks has played a guiding role not only in the lives of countless individuals but, over the last half-century, in the shape of our ever-evolving Nation. Throughout it all, she has been a great American teacher.
From Rosa Parks, we learned what it takes to be courageous in the face of oppression and hate. From Rosa Parks, we learned that sometimes to be strong is to say ``No.''
From Rosa Parks we learned that freedom without equality is no freedom at all. And from Rosa Parks we learned that fighting the bonds of orthodoxy and confronting the sources of ignorances is a noble and urgent cause.
Rosa Parks' legacy reminds us that a lone person can effect great change; many people working together with united purpose can achieve even more.
Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the young Montgomery preacher who helped to transform Rosa Parks' act of resistance into a powerful movement, would later say the ``arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.''
If we are to honor the legacy of Rosa Parks, we must never rest in our pursuit of that justice.
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