RKMBs Forums .::Important::. Politics and Current Events Rosa Parks is dead

Rosa Parks, civil rights heroine, is dead

Monday, October 24, 2005

BY CASSANDRA SPRATTLING
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER

When Rosa Parks refused to get up, an entire race of people began to stand up for their rights as human beings.

It was a simple act that took extraordinary courage in Montgomery, Ala., in 1955. It was a place where black people had no rights white people had to respect. It was a time when racial discrimination was so common, many blacks never questioned it.

At least not out loud.

But then came Rosa Parks.

This mild-mannered black woman refused to give up her seat on a city bus so a white man could sit down.

Jim Crow laws had met their match.

Parks' refusal infused 50,000 blacks in Montgomery with the will to walk rather than risk daily humiliation on the city's buses.

This gentle giant, whose quietness belied her toughness, became the catalyst for a movement that broke the back of legalized segregation in the United States, gave rise to the astounding leadership of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and inspired fighters for freedom and justice throughout the world.

Parks, the beloved mother of the civil rights movement, is dead, a family member confirmed late Monday.

But already it's evident that her spirit lives in hundreds of thousands of people inspired by her unwavering commitment to work for a better world - a commitment that continued even after age and failing health slowed her in the 1990s.

In death as in life, she touched the well known and the little known people of the world.

'Freedom is for all human beings'

Parks' health had been declining since the late 1990s. She had stopped giving interviews by then and rarely appeared in public. When she did, she only smiled or spoke short, barely audible responses.

In one of her last lengthy interviews with the Detroit Free Press in 1995, she spoke of what she would like people to say about her after she passed away.

"I'd like people to say I'm a person who always wanted to be free and wanted it not only for myself; freedom is for all human beings," she said during an interview from the pastor's study of St. Matthew African Methodist Episcopal Church, a small congregation she joined upon moving to Detroit in 1957.

While it's known worldwide that her refusal to give up her bus seat sparked the Montgomery bus boycott, it's less well known that Parks had a long history of trying to make life better for black people.

It was a desire embedded in her from childhood by her grandfather - her mother's father with whom she lived when she was growing up. He taught his children and grandchildren not to put up with mistreatment. "It was passed down almost in our genes," Parks wrote in her 1992 autobiography, "My Story." (Puffin, $5.99)

She recalled that when her grandfather was home, he kept a shotgun by his side in case the Ku Klux Klan dropped by.

Of her grandfather, Sylvester Edwards, she wrote: "I remember that sometimes he would call white men by their first names, or their whole names, and not say, 'Mister.' How he survived doing all those kinds of things, and being so outspoken, talking that big talk, I don't know, unless it was because he was so white and so close to being one of them."

Her grandfather's father was a white plantation owner; his mother a slave housekeeper and seamstress.

In recent years, Parks has relied heavily on a wheelchair and, according to court documents, suffers from dementia.

The dementia was revealed as a result of two lawsuits filed on her behalf against the record company for the hip hop duo Outkast. The 1999 lawsuit claims the record label BMG Entertainment violated her publicity and trademark rights for the 1998 song "Rosa Parks,' by using her name without her permission for commercial purposes.

But some of her family members claim Parks was incapable of filing such a suit of her own accord. They say it was an attempt by one of her attorneys, Gregory Reed and her longtime friend, Elaine Steele, to get money.

Meanwhile, in October of this year a federal judge appointed former Detroit Mayor Dennis Archer as her guardian ad litem-a temporary, court-appointed attorney to assure her interests in the lawsuits are fairly represented.

Steele has had durable power of attorney over Parks and serves as her patient advocate, meaning she will make medical decisions upon incapacitating illness since 1998, according to documents obtained by the Free Press.

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rex said:
She was someone who changed America for the better. She will be missed.

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r3x29yz4a said:

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rex said:
She was someone who changed America for the better. She will be missed.

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there are many great civil rights leaders who did many great things. there are those who faced dogs and the police with powerful fire hoses. those who faced death threats and beatings.

this women didn't get up from her seat because she was tired. that's it. she's not a hero, she was just feeling lazy and stubborn.

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r3x29yz4a said:

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rex said:
She was someone who changed America for the better. She will be missed.

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there are many great civil rights leaders who did many great things. there are those who faced dogs and the police with powerful fire hoses. those who faced death threats and beatings.

this women didn't get up from her seat because she was tired. that's it. she's not a hero, she was just feeling lazy and stubborn.

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r3x29yz4a said:
this women didn't get up from her seat because she was tired. that's it. she's not a hero, she was just feeling lazy and stubborn.

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r3x29yz4a said:

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rex said:
She was someone who changed America for the better. She will be missed.

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there are many great civil rights leaders who did many great things. there are those who faced dogs and the police with powerful fire hoses. those who faced death threats and beatings.

this women didn't get up from her seat because she was tired. that's it. she's not a hero, she was just feeling lazy and stubborn.

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r3x29yz4a said:
this women didn't get up from her seat because she was tired. that's it. she's not a hero, she was just feeling lazy and stubborn.

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r3x29yz4a said:

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rex said:
She was someone who changed America for the better. She will be missed.

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there are many great civil rights leaders who did many great things. there are those who faced dogs and the police with powerful fire hoses. those who faced death threats and beatings.

this women didn't get up from her seat because she was tired. that's it. she's not a hero, she was just feeling lazy and stubborn.

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Jim Jackson said:

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r3x29yz4a said:

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rex said:
She was someone who changed America for the better. She will be missed.

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there are many great civil rights leaders who did many great things. there are those who faced dogs and the police with powerful fire hoses. those who faced death threats and beatings.

this women didn't get up from her seat because she was tired. that's it. she's not a hero, she was just feeling lazy and stubborn.

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There's liberal, and then there's senseless.

Those remarks fall in the latter.

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r3x29yz4a said:

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Jim Jackson said:

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r3x29yz4a said:

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rex said:
She was someone who changed America for the better. She will be missed.

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there are many great civil rights leaders who did many great things. there are those who faced dogs and the police with powerful fire hoses. those who faced death threats and beatings.

this women didn't get up from her seat because she was tired. that's it. she's not a hero, she was just feeling lazy and stubborn.

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There's liberal, and then there's senseless.

Those remarks fall in the latter.

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i love how we can spend hours upon hours questioning the motives of political leaders on every little thing, how there are threads devoted to bitching about celebrities just want fame for donating time and money to charity, but an old woman who even said she was tired and didn't feel like moving is beyond reproach.

she didn't go and march and fight the dogs and hoses. she didn't rally a cause.
all the woman did was say she was too tired and didn't feel like standing up. and then she got stubborn and reacted out of pride.
that's it.

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PJP said:
she did rally a cause......you are dead wrong there. you may be able to argue your other points.....but not that one.

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Jim Jackson said:

Just because she was not aware, in the moment, what role she would play in history does not mean that we're permitted to denigrate that role as it is now seen in the light of that history.

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Lincoln didn't participate in beginnings of the Civil War to free the slaves either. But he ended up doing that. Martin Luther King Jr. knew Lincoln's role in the history of civil rights even if Lincoln didn't in that moment.

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PJP said:
she did rally a cause......you are dead wrong there. you may be able to argue your other points.....but not that one.

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r3x29yz4a said:
did she rally the cause purposefully or did she rally the cause unintentionally?

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r3x29yz4a said:
why not? history is constantly analyzed and reanalyzed.

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r3x29yz4a said:
all the woman did was say she was too tired and didn't feel like standing up. and then she got stubborn and reacted out of pride.

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a pride she wasn't afforded. a pride she didn't have the right to. a pride that no one else at the time showed.

it wasn't oprah '05 refusing to give up a seat, because her hundred dollar shoes hurt her feet. it was, essentially, a second-class human taking the stance that she wasn't second class.

it was someone doing what no one else had done before, what no one else "could" or "should" have done before. it was a contemporary impossibility, an unbreakable wall, an unthinkable impass.

"that's it."

history is filled with "minor" or even "faceless" heroes, whose ramifications on society and future generations has been astounding. whether the original ripple was initiated intentionally, purposefully, as a reaction, or as a pro-active movement simply does not matter.



what you call "too lazy," most everyone else acknowledges as "triumphantly revolutionary."

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Rob Kamphausen said:

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r3x29yz4a said:
all the woman did was say she was too tired and didn't feel like standing up. and then she got stubborn and reacted out of pride.

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a pride she wasn't afforded. a pride she didn't have the right to. a pride that no one else at the time showed.

it wasn't oprah '05 refusing to give up a seat, because her hundred dollar shoes hurt her feet. it was, essentially, a second-class human taking the stance that she wasn't second class.

it was someone doing what no one else had done before, what no one else "could" or "should" have done before. it was a contemporary impossibility, an unbreakable wall, an unthinkable impass.

"that's it."

history is filled with "minor" or even "faceless" heroes, whose ramifications on society and future generations has been astounding. whether the original ripple was initiated intentionally, purposefully, as a reaction, or as a pro-active movement simply does not matter.



what you call "too lazy," most everyone else acknowledges as "triumphantly revolutionary."

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RACK Gob.

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she didn't go and march

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she didn't rally a cause.

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Yes she did.

See, the general problem with debating you isn't that your ideas are wrong, it's that we can't even get to the point of discussing your ideas because they're based on a total ignorance of the facts (ooh, I used the term ignorant, you'd better tell be what an uncompassionate Christian I am). We could have a debate as to wether Rosa Parks was right or wrong to do what she did. We could debate wether she was too pasive in her prostests, but we can't debate it with you because as with most debates you come with a radical point of view based on a series of facts seemingly created in your own head.

You base your opinion on the fact that Rosa Parks never went and marched:



And the "fact" that she never rallied a cause:

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You exclaim that when she refused to sit at the back it was for no other reason but the fact that she was "old" Well here are some photos of the "elderly woman on the day of her arrest.


I should note that this "old" woman was in her early 20s.

Even your comparrison displays an ignorance of the facts you compare her to the real heroes by comparring her to those getting attacked by dogs or fire hoses. Those people didn't spray them selves with fire hose any more than she chose to get arrested.

The point is you have no idea what your talking about. You heard a joke while watching Barber Shop and now you think you're qualified to condemn a major catalist in teh civil rights movement dispite a complete and utter lack of facts.

At least now your friends on teh left know how we feel when debating you.

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wannabuyamonkey said:
You base your opinion on the fact that Rosa Parks never went and marched

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