Placement of Statue of Rosa Parks in National Statuary Hall

PLACEMENT OF STATUE OF ROSA PARKS IN NATIONAL STATUARY HALL -- (Extensions of Remarks - November 18, 2005)

SPEECH OF
HON. BENNIE G. THOMPSON
OF MISSISSIPPI
IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 2005

Mr. THOMPSON of Mississippi. Mr. Speaker, I would like to recognize the life and legacy of Rosa Lee Parks, whose refusal to give up her bus seat to a white man sparked the modern civil rights movement. She was 92 at the time of her death.

In tribute to Mrs. Parks, I would like to submit the following excerpt from the Washington Post Article, ``Bus Ride Shook a Nation's Conscience,'' written by Patricia Sullivan on Tuesday, October 25, 2005.

``Rosa was a true giant of the civil rights movement,'' said U.S. Representative JOHN CONYERS Jr. (D-Mich.), in whose office Parks worked for more than 20 years. ``There are very few people who can say their actions and conduct changed the face of the nation, and Rosa Parks is one of those individuals.''

Parks said that she didn't fully realize what she was starting when she decided not to move on that December 1, 1955, evening in Montgomery, AL. It was a simple refusal, but her arrest and the resulting protests began the complex cultural struggle to legally guarantee equal rights to Americans of all races.

Within days, her arrest sparked a 380-day bus boycott, which led to a U.S. Supreme Court decision that desegregated her city's public transportation. Her arrest also triggered mass demonstrations, made the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. famous, and transformed schools, workplaces and housing.

* Hers was ``an individual expression of a timeless longing for human dignity and freedom,'' King said in his book ``Stride Toward Freedom.''

``She was planted there by her personal sense of dignity and self-respect. She was anchored to that seat by the accumulated indignities of days gone and the boundless aspirations of generations yet unborn.''

She was the perfect test-case plaintiff, a fact that activists realized only after she had been arrested. Hardworking, polite and morally upright, Parks had long seethed over the everyday indignities of segregation, from the menial rules of bus seating and store entrances to the mortal societal endorsement of lynching and imprisonment.

She was an activist already, secretary of the local chapter of the NAACP. A member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church all her life, Parks admired the self-help philosophy of Booker T. Washington--to a point. But even as a child, she thought accommodating segregation was the wrong philosophy. She knew that in the previous year, two other women had been arrested for the same offense, but neither was deemed right to handle the role that was sure to become one of the most controversial of the century.

But it was as if Parks was born to the role. Rosa McCauley was born February. 4, 1913, in Tuskegee, AL, the home of Booker T. Washington's renowned Tuskegee Institute, which drew many African American intelligentsia. She was the daughter of a carpenter and a teacher, was small for her age, had poor health and suffered chronic tonsillitis. Still a child when her parents separated, she moved with her mother to Pine Level, AL., and grew up in an extended family that included her maternal grandparents.

Her mother taught Parks at home until she was 11, when she was enrolled in the Industrial School for Girls in Montgomery, where her aunt lived. Segregation was enforced, often violently. As an adult, she recalled watching her grandfather guard the front door with a shotgun as the Ku Klux Klan paraded down their road. Her younger brother, Sylvester, a decorated war hero in World War II, returned to a South that regarded uniformed veterans of color as ``uppity'' and demonstrated its disdain with beatings.

She married barber Raymond Parks in 1932 at her mother's house. They shared a passion for civil rights; her husband was an early defender of the Scottsboro Boys, a group of young African Americans whom rights advocates asserted were falsely accused of raping two white women.

Mr. Speaker, I take great pride in commending Mrs. Rosa Lee Parks for her outstanding and historical contributions to the State of Alabama, the State of Michigan, the Civil Rights Movement, and national politics.

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