[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 152 (Wednesday, November 16, 2005)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E2370]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




           RECOGNIZING THE OUTSTANDING EFFORTS OF ROSA PARKS

                                 ______
                                 

                     HON. C.A. DUTCH RUPPERSBERGER

                              of maryland

                    in the house of representatives

                      Wednesday, November 16, 2005

  Mr. RUPPERSBERGER. Mr. Speaker, I rise before you today to recognize 
a woman who changed a nation and sent a clear message to America that 
her people would not be moved. Rosa Parks, who is better known as the 
``mother of the civil rights movement'' changed the course of American 
history by refusing in 1955 to give up her seat on a bus for a white 
passenger.
  Born Rosa Louise McCauley on February 4, 1913, she married Raymond 
Parks in 1932. By the early 1950s, Rosa Parks and her now deceased 
husband were long-time activists in Montgomery, Alabama's chapter of 
the NAACP.
  It is important to know the history of Parks, who worked as a 
seamstress at a local department store, and on her way home from work 
one day, she engaged in a simple gesture of defiance that galvanized 
the civil rights movement. On December 1, 1955, Parks challenged the 
South's Jim Crow laws--and Montgomery's segregated bus seating policy--
by refusing to give her seat up. The bus driver had her arrested. She 
was tried and convicted of violating a local ordinance.
  Her act sparked a citywide boycott of the bus system by African 
Americans that lasted more than a year. The boycott raised an unknown 
clergyman named Martin Luther King, Jr., to national prominence and 
resulted in the U.S. Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation on 
city buses.
  Over the next four decades, she made her fellow Americans aware of 
the history of the civil rights struggle.
  This pioneer in the struggle for racial equality was planted firm in 
her faith of it one day being a place where all Americans could one day 
sit on the bus and have the same right as everyone else to enjoy their 
ride after a long days work.
  Her example of what she stood for remains an inspiration to not only 
me but to freedom-loving people everywhere.
  Parks was undoubtedly one of the most important citizens of the 20th 
century. Every American owes their gratitude of freedom to her. Mr. 
Speaker, I ask that you rise with me today to honor and pay respects to 
an African American woman who broke down boundaries and knocked down 
doors.

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