Rosa Parks Federal Building

ROSA PARKS FEDERAL BUILDING -- (House of Representatives - October 26, 2005)

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Ms. NORTON. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. For this side I will be introducing the bill, and after I make an introductory statement, and the next time you go to our side, I want my colleagues to hear from the gentlewoman who is responsible for this bill, Ms. Kilpatrick, who has indicated she wants me to introduce it.

I want to thank her for this bill to designate the Federal Building, which is located at 333 Mt. Elliott Street in Detroit, Michigan, as the Rosa Parks Federal Building, and I want to thank her for really her quite extraordinary diligence in making sure that this bill came to the floor.

I want to say that this bill happens to come to the floor a few days after the death of Rosa Parks, but who is certainly not responsible for the tardiness of this bill reaching the floor is Ms. Kilpatrick. For months she has been talking to me as the ranking member of the subcommittee. For about the same length of time she has been talking with our ranking member Mr. Oberstar. I am sure nobody on our committee meant to hold this bill up, but the truth is that we very much desired for this bill to come to the floor before Rosa Parks died. We knew she was elderly. We are very grateful, however, to the majority for allowing this bill to come forward now in advance of the funeral so that Ms. Kilpatrick, who has carried this bill for so long, can go home to say the Congress has approved what I know Members on both sides would very much want to approve.

We all know the story of that December evening in 1955 when a 42-year-old black woman riding a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, refused to give up her seat at the demand of a white male passenger. This simple gesture, it was indeed more than a gesture; it was an act, and an action that our country will never forget, led to the disintegration of institutionalized segregation in much of the South and ushered in a new era now known as the civil rights era of our country.

Characteristically, Ms. Parks always played down her courageous act. Her strength of character and quiet, but determined sense of justice changed our country, however. Montgomery's segregation laws were very complex and deeply humiliating. For example, blacks were required to pay their fare to the driver and then get off the bus and reenter through the rear door. If the white section was full, blacks were required to give up their seats altogether, no matter what their age, and no matter what their infirmity, and move to the back of the bus.

Rosa Parks was very familiar with these humiliations; however, she was a self-educated, early activist with her own local NAACP, her time at the Highland School in Tennessee, but never particularly intending at that moment to engage in an act of civil disobedience. She simply was ready when the moment of humiliation came. For her boldness, she was arrested and found guilty of disorderly conduct.

This action led to the famous Montgomery bus boycott that lasted over a year and, ultimately, to the Supreme Court decision that banned segregation on the city's public transportation systems, and, Mr. Speaker, therefore, on all public transportation throughout the United States. It is impossible to overstate the impact of her act of gentle defiance.

Rosa Parks' story has now become legendary in American history. I am honored to support this bill. It is a most fitting way to respect her life and to acknowledge her lifelong contributions to equality and justice for all Americans.

Mr. Speaker, it is with great pleasure that I yield such time as she may consume to the gentlewoman from Michigan (Ms. Kilpatrick), the sponsor of this bill, who is responsible for its emergence on the floor today.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Ms. NORTON. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the gentleman from California (Mr. Rohrabacher) for the graciousness of his remarks. I want to thank the gentlewoman from Michigan (Ms. Kilpatrick) for her great diligence in making sure that this bill would be introduced and come forward now.

I want to say in closing that we are accustomed to revolutions being made by armies. We must appreciate what it meant for the opening shot, as it were, of the civil rights movement to have come from a gentlewoman who simply sat in her seat. After 400 years of slavery and discrimination, it might have been a bomb. It was instead an act which set the pattern of nonviolent resistance for the entire civil rights movement.

Please understand that Rosa Parks acted at great personal risk to herself. We may forget what life was like in the 1950s. We all know this, that black men had been lynched for less, and yet she stood there not knowing what would happen after she was arrested.

The remarks of the gentleman from California reminds us what she has done for our country, that essentially she has united our country with one message for all time, and that message does not know partisan lines. What she and the nonviolent revolution that she made that saved our country had done is to bring Republicans and Democrats to the same spot, to the understanding that equality under law is a basic American principle. We could celebrate that principle no better than by honoring the woman who set off the revolution with her gentle act, Rosa Parks.

I thank my good friends from the other side for bringing this bill forward.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

http://thomas.loc.gov/