[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 154 (Friday, November 18, 2005)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E2424]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




      PLACEMENT OF STATUE OF ROSA PARKS IN NATIONAL STATUARY HALL

                                 ______
                                 

                               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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