Rosa Parks statue to be unveiled Sunday in downtown Montgomery

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

Source: USA Today

MONTGOMERY, Ala. – A statue of civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks will be unveiled Sunday in downtown Montgomery, an event coinciding with the day in 1955 when Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a public bus to a white man.

Her arrest sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott, a pivotal moment in the civil rights movement.

The statue will be unveiled at 1:30 p.m. at Montgomery Plaza at the Court Street Fountain, the city of Montgomery announced.

The statue will be placed approximately 30 feet from the spot where Parks is believed to have boarded the bus, said Ashley Ledbetter, executive director of the Montgomery Area Business Committee for the Arts.



Read more: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/rosa-parks-statue-to-be-unveiled-sunday-in-downtown-montgomery/ar-BBXzGiG?li=BBnbfcL

[shenmue]

1. Yes

[Karadeniz]

2. Good! About time!

[a kennedy]

4. Damn right, bout time.......

[dustyscamp]

3. They need to put up some cameras in the area just in case some vandals show up

[SunSeeker]

6. Yep, racists will try to deface it. They're so predictable. nt

[ProfessorGAC]

12. My First Thought, Too

You just know some slimeball will target it.

[dware]

5. Long time overdue.

Good that a statute has been erected, but it should have been done decades ago.

[TheBlackAdder]

7. It's a shame that the teenage girl who preceeded Rosa Parks didn't gain the same attention.

.

After school on March 2, 1955, Claudette Colvin walked to downtown Montgomery with three of her classmates. She and her friends were going to take the city bus home from school that day. When they boarded the bus, they sat behind the first five rows, which were reserved for white passengers. A young white woman boarded the bus after Colvin and her friends and found nowhere to sit because the white section was full. Bus drivers had the authority to make black passengers move for white passengers, even if they were sitting in the black section. The bus driver asked Colvin and her friends to get up, which her friends immediately did. She refused to move. On her mind were the lessons she had learned throughout her life, especially during Negro History Month at her school just days before. Though her friends’ seats (one next to Colvin and two across the aisle) were now vacant, the white woman refused to sit in them because, according to Jim Crow laws, black people could not sit next to next to white people. They had to sit behind white people to show their inferiority. When asked again, Colvin refused to get up. The bus driver alerted the traffic police, and three stops later, a traffic officer came onto the bus and asked her why she was sitting there and why she would not get up. She replied, “because it’s my constitutional right,” and told him she was not breaking the segregation law by sitting there. The traffic officer told the bus driver that the police needed to get involved. A stop or two later, two police officers came onto the bus and instructed Colvin to get up. She refused. She later said, “I could not move because history had me glued to the seat…Sojourner Truth’s hands were pushing me down on one shoulder and Harriet Tubman’s hands were pushing me down on another shoulder.” The police officers each grabbed one of her arms, kicked her, threw her books from her lap, and “manhandled” her off the bus. They shoved her in their police car, handcuffed her through the windows, and took her off to jail. She was the first person to be arrested for challenging Montgomery’s bus segregation laws.


https://www.womenshistory.org/articles/girl-who-acted-rosa-parks

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[SunSeeker]

9. Claudette Colvin will be honored with a marker at the Parks memorial.

From the article at the OP link:

Along with the Parks memorial, the city will present two historic markers for Browder v. Gayle – the landmark case that ruled segregation on Montgomery buses unconstitutional.

Aurelia Browder, Mary Louise Smith, Susie McDonald and Claudette Colvin will be honored with the markers.

[TheBlackAdder]

10. It's a shame she doesn't get a statue, or even the same name recognition as the true pioneer.

[SunSeeker]

11. Rosa Parks' resistance involved a legal strategy for permanent change.

Parks was not the first person to resist bus segregation, but the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) believed that she was the best candidate for seeing through a court challenge after her arrest for civil disobedience in violating Alabama segregation laws. Parks' prominence in the community and her willingness to become a controversial figure inspired the black community to boycott the Montgomery buses for over a year, the first major direct action campaign of the post-war civil rights movement. Her case became bogged down in the state courts, but the federal Montgomery bus lawsuit Browder v. Gayle succeeded in November 1956.[2][3]

Parks' act of defiance and the Montgomery bus boycott became important symbols of the movement. She became an international icon of resistance to racial segregation. She organized and collaborated with civil rights leaders, including Edgar Nixon, president of the local chapter of the NAACP; and Martin Luther King Jr., a new minister in Montgomery who gained national prominence in the civil rights movement and went on to win a Nobel Peace Prize.

At the time, Parks was secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP. She had recently attended the Highlander Folk School, a Tennessee center for training activists for workers' rights and racial equality. She acted as a private citizen "tired of giving in". Although widely honored in later years, she also suffered for her act; she was fired from her job as a seamstress in a local department store, and received death threats for years afterwards.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa_Parks

Your suggestion that Parks was not a "true pioneer" is wrong.

[BumRushDaShow]

13. As a note as SunSeeker provided some info about

Rosa Parks was, at that time, Secretary of that local NAACP chapter, so her act (which has unfortunately been made into a bit of a myth because so little of black history was discussed in schools or daily discourse), was deliberate.

Some of the "myths" that surrounded her included her being "an old lady whose feet hurt" where in reality, she was 42 when that incident occurred. I remember Joe Madison (who later worked with her at the Detroit NAACP when she moved to Detroit and he was a political director for the organization) always remarking about a conversation he had with her and how she laughed about the characterization... i.e., (paraphrased by him) - "Don't let them tell you that I did this because 'my feet hurt'".

There are thousands upon thousands of "unsung heroes" among the Civil Rights movement - whether for racial, gender, orientation, or disability equality. But what happens is you have one or two who are able to articulate an issue in a unique and powerful way on behalf of others. Just like what Emmett Till's mother did on behalf of her son, where her son was but one of many thousands who were lynched for just plain racist and nonsensical reasons - and as he relates to Rosa Parks, it was the reason WHY she actually did what she did and also why MLK, who was in his mid-20s at the time, eventually did what he did and became part of the Civil Rights movement (where the rest of his story is history) -

https://nmaahc.si.edu/blog-post/emmett-tills-death-inspired-movement

To this day, the markers that have been erected on behalf of Emmett Till continued to be stolen and defaced - the 4th one just erected a couple months ago, is bullet-proof-



after the previous one was used for target practice -

[SunSeeker]

8. About time! It's 2019!

She died in 2005. It would have been nice if she had been able to see it unveiled.

But I am grateful she is finally being commemorated at that historic spot.