Rosa Parks
Rosa Parks
Rosa Louise McCauley Parkswas an African American civil rights activist, whom the United States Congress called "the first lady of civil rights" and "the mother of the freedom movement". Her birthday, February 4, and the day she was arrested, December 1, have both become Rosa Parks Day, commemorated in California and Missouri, and Ohio and Oregon...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionCivil Rights Leader
Date of Birth4 February 1913
CityTuskegee, AL
CountryUnited States of America
was that I was a person with dignity and self-respect, and I should not set my sights lower than anybody else just because I was black.
so that the citizens of the United States may pay their last respects to this great American.
People are exploiting it, ... We are very concerned about that.
I was just trying to let them know how I felt about being treated as a human being,
He was the first, aside from my grandfather and Mr. Gus Vaughn, who was never actually afraid of white people, ... So many African Americans felt that you just had to be under Mr. Charlie's heel - that's what we called the white man, Mr. Charlie - and couldn't do anything to cross him. In other words, Parks believed in being a man and expected to be treated as a man.
I heard that she sat down on the bus. That is all that I know. They don't tell you too much about this stuff at school. They talk mostly about military tactics and how wars were won.
if she could not survive as humble and as sweet as she was in a segregated society ? nobody could survive.
It was just a matter of survival...of existing from one day to the next. I remember going to sleep as a girl and hearing the Ku Klux Klan ride at night and hearing a lynching and being afraid the house would burn down.
Her act of civil disobedience, for which she was willing to pay the price to end the rein of terror, got her arrested.
He pointed at me and said, 'that one won't stand up.' The two policemen came near me and only one spoke to me. He asked me if the driver had asked me to stand up? I said, 'yes.' He asked me why I didn't stand up, ... I told him I didn't think I should have to stand up. So I asked him: 'Why do you push us around?' And he told me, 'I don't know, but the law is the law and you are under arrest.'
All I was doing was trying to get home from work.
My only concern was to get home after a hard day's work.
Arrest me for sitting on a bus? You may do that.
I see the energy of young people as a real force for positive change.