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[ Applause ]
-We're back, and let's meet our next team of challengers.
Number one. What is your name, please?
-My name is Rosa Parks.
-Number two.
-My name is Rosa Parks.
-And number three.
-My name is Rosa Parks.
-Once again, panel, these three ladies
all claim to be civil rights champion Rosa Parks,
and let's start the questioning with Kitty Carlisle.
-Number two, what led up to this glorious moment on that bus?
-How did you feel at the moment of arrest?
[ Bell dings ] -That bell tells us
the time is up. And now, of course,
it's time to vote whoever,
in your opinion, is the real Rosa Parks.
-I voted for number two,
and it's just based on a feeling.
She just has that gentleness,
I think, that would allow to be defiant.
-Okay. -Any one of these three ladies
could have had the courage, and I'm ashamed to say,
I don't really know which one it really is,
but I voted for number two.
-All right. And Nipsey, who got your vote?
-Well, I'll have to disqualify myself.
I know Mrs. Parks,
and I was one of the entertainers on that show
between Selma and Montgomery,
but Ms. Rosa Parks is 10 foot tall,
and she's a legend and a hero
in the democracy of the United States,
not just among black people.
[ Applause ]
-And now, will the real Rosa Parks please stand up?
[ Applause ]
-The first lady of the movement, Mrs. Rosa Parks.
Raise your hand.
-Reverend Abernathy and all of my brothers and sisters
and my children, because I have been called the mother of this,
we are not in a struggle of black against white,
but wrong and right.
-Rosa Parks is arguably one of the most celebrated Americans
of the 20th century
and arguably one of the most kind of distorted
and misunderstood.
-You see before you now
a victim of all that has been perpetrated against one
to make us less than human.
-Yes, we all understand that she went and sat down on the bus.
The narrow narrative of her just on one day did something --
We need to dispel that.
-I am handicapped in every way,
but I am expected to be a first-class citizen.
I want to be one.
Of course, last few days in Selma,
actually I almost lost the faith.
And I said to myself I could not come here,
seeing what had happened in Selma, armed with only love.
-If they could see her
talking about the Republic of New Afrika.
If they could see her out there with the Panthers in Oakland.
If they could see her in all of these fragrant varieties
of her personality,
then they would understand the real Rosa Parks,
but they might have been just a little bit frightened.
-Yeah
-Please, Lord, won't you bind my hands?
'Cause I don't want to hurt nobody
Oh, Lord, won't you guide my soul?
'Cause I don't want to act ungodly
Oh, Lord, won't you help my soul?
These heathens want to steal my faith
I really need some self-control
I'm trying not to fall from grace
Lord, please, won't you help my soul?
Come strengthen my faith
Strengthen my faith
-Yeah
-"I have never been an integrationist.
Even when there was segregation,
there was plenty of integration in the South,
but it was for the benefit and convenience
of the white person, not us.
It is the discontinuation of oppression
for all people who are oppressed.
All people should be treated equally,
regardless of race, religion, or nationality."
-As a very small child, I had to hide
from the Ku Klux Klan to keep from getting killed
or thinking I was going to be killed.
My family were deprived of the land
that they owned and driven off of it
after they'd worked and paid for it.
I did not have the opportunity to attend school as many have.
-The early 20th century,
this is the period that is often referred to as the Nadir,
the low point, in African American history.
And some people even argue
that it's a period worse than slavery.
-"By the time I was 6, I was old enough to realize
that we were actually not free.
The Ku Klux Klan was riding through the black community,
burning churches, killing people.
I later learned that it was because
African American soldiers were returning from World War I
and acting as if they deserved equal rights
because they had served their country.
At one point, the violence was so bad
that my grandfather kept his gun close by at all times.
My grandfather was going to defend his home
whatever happened.
I wanted to see him shoot that gun."
-She would be telling me about the grandfather
and how he wasn't afraid of white people.
He looked white, but he wasn't afraid of white people.
-"My grandfather's father was a white plantation owner
named John Edwards, and his mother was a slave housekeeper.
My grandfather was close to white.
She died when my grandfather was very young,
and then John Edwards died, too.
An overseer took over the plantation,
and he disliked my grandfather,
treated him so badly that he had a very intense,
passionate hatred for white people.
My grandfather was the one who instilled in my mother
that you don't put up with bad treatment from anybody.
It was passed down almost in our genes."
-He had his shotgun ready, and I sat up with him all night,
and I still have a chronic insomnia
from some of the things I lived through when I was a child.
-If you were out there on guard at night,
you ain't making no noise.
She understood you protected what was important to you.
And Rosa got the idea that, "I want to change
that what makes me have
to need to be protected."
White supremacy was the threat.
Her brother was, I think, two and a half or something younger.
-"Sylvester followed me around all the time.
He was always into mischief,
but I was very protective of him."
-They were coming home one day
and were being taunted by a young white boy.
-"I would rather be lynched than say 'I don't like it.'
I cried bitterly that I would be lynched
rather than be run over by them.
They could get the rope ready for me any time they wanted
to do their lynching."
-We got to understand that about this woman,
that she was a soldier from birth,
that she was going to fight you.
-Her quietness was actually her strength.
And she would let you know if she didn't agree with you,
but she would let you know without raising her voice.
-"My mother taught me quite a bit about reading.
She taught me the alphabet and figures and counting
before I even started going to school.
Just a very short distance from where I lived was a new school.
It was without question for the white students.
They had bus accommodations, and we never did.
I'd see the bus pass by my house every day.
At one time, I had to walk at least 3 miles to school.
The bus was among the first ways
I realized there was a black world and a white world.
The schools in the South were the best training ground
for teaching Negro inferiority and white supremacy.
A young child starting to school could very soon learn
that the white children went to beautiful,
well-appointed and equipped school buildings,
while Negro children went to roughly built
uncomfortable shacks with no desks,
but rough plank benches."
-Education for black kids ends at sixth grade.
Her mother finds that unacceptable,
so her mother sends her to a school in Montgomery
called Ms. White's,
and a number of the women who go to Ms. White's
will end up being active
in Montgomery civil rights community.
-"I learned quite a bit about sewing.
What I learned at Ms. White's school 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.
Raymond Parks was the first real activist I ever met.
He was a longtime member of the NAACP."
-He was the first man I had met
since the death of my grandfather
that was not ready to accept what we call bowing
and scraping, and "yes-yes'ing."
-"He was in his late 20s
and working as a barber in the black barbershop
in downtown Montgomery."
-A mutual friend introduces Rosa
and Raymond Parks to one another.
Rosa's initially not interested.
-"I thought he was too white.
I had an aversion to white men
with the exception of my grandfather,
and Raymond Parks is very light-skinned."
-Her experience with light-skinned black men
is that they're usually politically timid.
Couldn't be further from the truth, right, about Raymond.
-"Parks -- everyone called him Parks --
would tell me about his problems
growing up being very fair complected."
-He's also the owner of a red Nash.
Raymond starts to talk about politics,
and immediately she's captivated by his authority on matters
that are relevant to the black freedom struggle, right?
Particularly at this time
the Scottsboro Boys' case.
-He was very much concerned with the young black boys
who were being railroaded
to the electric chair.
-Eight black teenagers and one boy.
They're on this train in search of work.
They get into a scuffle with some white men.
-There were two white women on the train
who were arrested as well, and to protect themselves,
they claimed that they were raped by these black boys.
-The Scottsboro Boys are very quickly tried,
and all but the youngest one, who's 12,
are sentenced to death.
-"I thought it was awful that they were condemned to die
for a crime they did not commit.
It demonstrated how little regard segregationists
had for the lives of black people
and the lengths they would go to keep us in fear."
-I would want to go along with him to the meetings
and hear the discussions,
but he always said it was too dangerous.
-"The police were always on the lookout
for people to intimidate.
The police killed two men who were connected with the group
Parks was with, people Parks knew well."
-People were certainly concerned with being killed,
being imprisoned.
Raymond embraced armed self-defense
during the Scottsboro campaign.
-He and I stayed up for many a night and didn't sleep at all.
When he left home, I did not know whether he'd be brought in
or lying in the street dead someplace.
-One of the biggest myths in the history
of the black freedom movement
is that nonviolence is the default position.
That's not true. It's the other way around.
And Rosa Parks grew up in a movement culture
in which armed self-defense was simply taken for granted.
-Mother Parks supported self-defense
because she would not have been a supporter
of the Republic of New Afrika had she not been.
-The Republic of New Afrika
is attempting to abide by the law.
Our weapons are all defensive.
We wouldn't carry them if we were not in the state
that has shed so much black blood.
-The Republic of New Afrika was founded
by a man who was then known as Richard Henry,
who later became known as Dr. Imari Obadele.
-The point of the RNA was to demand reparations
for slavery and Jim Crow,
to develop armed self-defense groups
to defend black people,
and to basically demand territory in the South.
-And Mother Rosa Parks,
she became friends with Robert Williams
and his wife, Mabel Williams, who was also a revolutionary.
In Jackson, Mississippi,
their headquarters was seized upon by authorities.
Law enforcement who were not enforcing the law --
They were attacking them.
They were shooting at members of the Republic of New Afrika,
members of the Republic of New Afrika shot back.
-Two Jackson police officers and one FBI agent
were hit by the gunfire from inside the house.
Tear gas and reinforcements were used to run
the occupants of the house outside.
Finally, seven members of the black Republic of New Afrika
surrendered at the rear of the house.
-Since a member of law enforcement has been killed,
people are very worried that they're going to assault,
torture, kill the members of the RNA
that they've now brought into police custody.
-Although Dr. Obadele did none of the shooting
and none of the causes of violence,
he was the one held responsible,
and he was sentenced to five years of federal imprisonment.
And Mother Parks contacted the prison just to check on him.
She said, "I want to know the condition of Imari Obadele,"
and they called him Richard Henry. "How is he?
What is his welfare?"
Dr. Imari Obadele said that Mother Parks calling the prison
that held him for five years is the reason he was alive.
To her, there was no conflict
between supporting Imari Obadele and Robert Williams
or supporting Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,
whom she loved.
She saw that as the same line of freedom fighting.
She was holistic in her approach to the right
of all people to be free.
-"I came to understand that Parks
was willing to work for things that would improve life
for his race and his family and himself.
The second time Parks and I were ever in each other's company,
he talked about getting married.
I hadn't given marriage a thought at all.
We were married in Pine Level in my mother's home.
It was not a big wedding, just family and close friends."
-Uncle Parks was one of the best of men.
He was kind, he was quiet as well, and reserved.
-They moved to the Cleveland Courts projects.
Rosa Parks, people look at her as a middle-class woman,
but they'd never own a house, not in their entire marriage.
-Her first meeting with the NAACP,
the secretary was out.
They asked her if she'd take the minutes.
It was election day, and they elected her secretary.
-"Mr. Nixon was considered
the most militant man in Montgomery.
He was the very first person who approached me
about the need to get registered.
Mr. Nixon organized the Voters League.
I became a member.
I was impressed by his potential leadership.
He explained to me very fully the necessity
of getting registered to vote in order to elect those officials
that would be beneficial to us
and would increase our ability and opportunity
to become first-class citizens.
The segregationists made it very difficult
for black people to register to vote."
-And it was...
practically impossible to a black person,
regardless of their intelligence,
to become registered, except for a very few
that were selected by the white community.
-African Americans were largely being
shut out of the ballot box.
This was a period where one would have to encounter
unrelenting violence
simply for wanting to vote.
[ Woman vocalizing ]
[ Woman chanting indistinctly ]
[ Crowd chanting indistinctly ]
-Rosa Parks for all of her life was fighting on issues
that are still very much at the forefront
of national discussion and debate.
-These battles are ongoing.
Today, you look at the rampant voter suppression
taking place across the country.
State houses at the local level
are introducing voter suppression laws
that are meant to keep the ballot box narrow
and as white as possible.
-"The right to vote is so important for Americans.
We vote for the people to represent us in government.
I decided to get registered.
The first year I tried was 1943.
I went down to register and take my tests,
but I did not receive a certificate in the mail.
The second time I tried, I was denied.
They just told me, 'You didn't pass.'
They didn't have to give you a reason.
The registrar could do whatever they wanted to do.
I was pretty sure I passed the test,
so the third time I took the test,
I made a copy of my answers to those questions.
I was going to keep that copy and use it to bring suit
against the voter registration board,
but I received my certificate in the mail."
-"When I tried to register to vote,
I was put off a Montgomery bus for the first time."
-The Women's Political Council was an organization
that had begun in 1946 after just dozens of black people
had been arrested on the buses for segregation purposes.
We had sat down and witnessed the arrest and humiliation
and the court trials and fines paid
of people who just sat down on an empty seat.
Something had to be done.
-The fight to desegregate public transportation
was part of a larger fight for citizenship rights.
-Nixon is also working to protect black people
who are victims of white violence
and in particular black women
who have been raped and sexually assaulted.
-She felt strongly that the same mind-set
that tolerates sexual violence against black women
by these white men is the same mind-set
that will refuse to hold people accountable
when they engage in mob lynchings and racial terror.
-"Is it worthwhile to reveal the intimacies of the past life?
Would the people be sympathetic or disillusioned
when the facts of my life are told?"
-Rosa Parks writes this very interesting narrative
of which she describes a near sexual assault.
And this is something that takes place in her teenage years.
She's working as a domestic at the time.
-"I saw Mr. Charlie standing in the kitchen.
Mr. Charlie poured himself a drink.
He moved nearer to me and put his hand on my waist.
I was very frightened, nearly to death.
I jumped away, and he was a bit startled
and asked me not to be afraid.
He had money to give me for accepting his attentions.
I knew that no matter what happened,
I would never yield to this white man's bestiality.
I was ready and willing to die.
But give my consent?
Never, never, never.
I talked of everything I know
about the white man's inhumane treatment of the Negro,
how I hated all white people, especially him.
He asked me to give him a price.
I turned away, saying I was not for sale.
If he wanted to kill me and rape a dead body,
he was welcome, but that he would have to kill me first.
At long last, Mr. Charlie got the idea
that I meant no, very definitely no."
-Ms. Parks was compelled to document crimes
because people weren't reacting the way
she thought they should react.
People were a little too accepting
of some of that victimization even within the black community.
-We had so many cases of brutality,
sometimes murder, sometimes flogging,
sometimes being driven from their homes.
And I was on call if anybody needed me to say something
and write up a report or whatever,
if they would have the courage to sign it.
And I had been known in the community
to come to the rescue of people when sometime others didn't.
They were almost unbelievable.
I wouldn't like to even mention to you
some of the things that I had to undergo.
-"I remember one case out in Abbeville, Alabama,
where my father and his family came from.
Mrs. Recy Taylor was on her way home from church
when she was kidnapped,
forced into a car at gun- and knife-point,
stripped of her clothing,
and raped by six white men on September 3, 1944."
-Then put a blindfold on her, took her back,
and dumped her in the middle of town, and said,
"If you tell anybody, we'll kill you."
She went promptly to the sheriff and told him.
And they realized that nothing's going to happen to these men.
-Rosa Parks hears about this from a white woman
they know through Scottsboro organizing.
So Rosa Parks and some of her comrades decide
that they should investigate it.
-Rosa Parks was sent to get the testimony.
In those times, to go 100 miles from home.
The sheriff is outside driving by.
There he goes again.
Well, there he is.
I just only can imagine what that must have been like,
sitting there, actually having her tell that story,
and Rosa Parks writing down every word.
-It was incredibly dangerous for a black woman to report,
to detail that they had been the victims of sexual violence.
For Ms. Parks, it was especially dangerous
going into communities
because she was seen as the problem.
-In collaboration with several other activists,
they go as far as to take out an ad in the local newspaper
in order to let people know what had taken place
and to place pressure on law enforcement to do something.
-They write letters to the governor.
They get media coverage, but the men are never indicted.
-It was clear that Ms. Parks
had a commitment to fighting patriarchy.
She committed her whole life to saying sexual assault
in our communities is something that has to be eradicated.
-I think that the most important issue here
is whether a woman has the right to defend herself.
It raises the question, what right does a woman have?
-Joan Little is 20, black,
and charged with the murder of a white jailer in Washington,
North Carolina.
-And Rosa Parks started a Free Joan Little Movement in Detroit
to try to help with her cause.
-Joan Little was a young woman
who was incarcerated in North Carolina.
And there was a jailer there who regularly raped
the women who were in his jail.
And he attempted to do that with Joan Little,
and he ended up not living through that assault.
-She was finally acquitted,
but it took a whole long movement,
and Rosa Parks was one of the voices of that movement.
-Joan Little was the first woman in the United States
who ever fought back and killed her assailant
who was, indeed, exonerated.
So that was a landmark case.
-Rosa Parks considered that one of the great victories
in the justice struggle.
[ Camera shutters clicking ]
-There's a continuum from her work in the South
in the 1940s.
I'm thinking specifically of Recy Taylor.
-The Recy Taylor case spurs Nixon and Parks
to run for branch leadership.
And that's when Nixon runs for branch president and wins.
She runs for secretary and wins.
E.D. Nixon and Rosa Parks begin a partnership
that's going to change the face of American history.
They will spend the next decade turning Montgomery's NAACP
into a much more activist branch.
-Before, the Montgomery branch was largely dysfunctional.
There was a lot of infighting,
financial troubles with the organization,
and a lot of elitism.
The organization was run by some of the middle-class,
college-educated black elite in Montgomery.
-Montgomery was always a class-stratified society.
The black elite took a position that Negroes should go slow.
They should take their time.
And that's not the politics that Rosa Parks adopted.
Whoo
-She ran at a faster pace
than a lot of her contemporaries.
She wanted to go faster.
And you sense that in her work in the '40s.
She just wasn't going to be content with the status quo.
-My only brother, who had served almost four years in the war,
was discharged honorably.
He was quite upset because he felt that those of us at home
had failed those on the war front.
-My grandfather, he served in two theaters in World War II.
A highly respected military man at the time.
And he came home and was mistreated.
You know what I mean?
You serve your country, and then you come home
to a place in which you would think you would get the flowers,
you would get the accolades, you would get, at least,
"Don't call me boy or nigger."
-Sylvester will decide he can't bear this.
And so, in 1946, he and his family leave Montgomery,
and they never come back.
And he moves to Detroit.
-"Things happened that most people never heard about
because they never were reported in the newspapers.
At times, I felt overwhelmed by all the violence and hatred.
But there was nothing to do but keep going."
-At that time, I felt that I had a message and felt very vocal,
but people did not choose to listen to what I was saying then
because they didn't think there was any reason for my being
so concerned about doing away with segregation
because they thought it was a hopeless cause.
I was working very hard to bring about freedom,
especially for young people through the NAACP.
-And the Hebrew children from the fiery furnace
Why not every man?
-Rosa Parks had a youth group here at the church
when I was a young teenager,
and we would talk about the NAACP and its workings.
-And why not every man?
-I was 11 when I joined the Youth Council.
Montgomery was a very scary place
that the white community considered a threat to them.
-It was very difficult
because most of the parents discouraged their youngsters
and didn't want them to participate or join.
They didn't mind them paying the membership,
but they didn't want them to actively participate in writing
to the Congressmen and challenging segregation locally.
-We met most of the times
in Mrs. Parks' apartment.
I was drawn to her passion on eradicating the conditions
that were going on in our communities.
If there were 12 people in here, it was an overflow crowd.
Ms. Parks mostly was sitting over there
and conducting the meetings.
But we talked a lot about voter registration
and events we were planning.
-It was not, for her, like, "We're going to pass the torch."
It was, "I will help you, and we will do this,
and we will talk about how to do it,
but I believe in you, young people."
-You kind of feel the energy.
Wow.
I am...
I'm almost speechless.
-"Colored people are employed at this store as maids,
porters, elevator operators, truck drivers.
I work in the tailor shop doing men's clothing alterations
as a helper of the tailor who is colored.
This thing called segregation here
is complete and solid pattern as a way of life."
-To make money on the side, Rosa Parks is tailoring
for one of Montgomery's
few white civil rights activist families,
Clifford and Virginia Durr.
Parks and Virginia began a friendship.
-"She wanted to be part of our efforts to end segregation,
even though that meant being ostracized and made to suffer."
-Durr is affiliated with Highlander Folk School.
-The school was a new beginning,
a link between the towns and the mountain.
Myles Horton was its founder.
-If we could demonstrate by the way we lived
and what we believed and the way we treated people,
that there was a possibility of, in this situation,
blacks and whites, working things out.
We hoped that idea would have some small influence.
-The Highlander Folk School is trying to build a program
that's dedicated to having people challenge segregation
throughout the South.
-In the summer of 1955,
Highlander is organizing a two-week workshop,
and they have a scholarship for someone to come from Montgomery.
And Virginia Durr recommends Rosa Parks.
-I hadn't traveled very much at that time.
Just getting on the bus,
I found myself going further and further away
from the type of surroundings I was used to.
It was my very first experience in my entire life
going to a place where there were people of another race
and where we were all treated equally
and without any tension or feeling of embarrassment
or whatever goes with artificial boundaries
of racial segregation.
Myles Horton, along with his staff,
did give me my first insight on the fact
that there were such people
who believed completely in freedom and equality for all.
-At the time Rosa Parks came to Highlander,
we were just beginning to get some understanding
in the South of the possibilities,
the hope of doing something.
Ms. Parks was probably the quietest participant
in the workshop,
but we had high hopes for her.
-I was somewhat withdrawn and didn't have very much to say.
But finally I relaxed and enjoyed the stay very much
throughout the entire workshop.
-It's there that she begins to get even a sharper
and a broader understanding of this struggle for civil rights.
-That particular school, Myles Horton,
is responsible for me today
not hating every white person I see.
I learned at that time and at that place
that there are decent people of any race and color.
-"The Montgomery NAACP was beginning to think
about filing a suit against the city over bus segregation,
but they had to have the right plaintiff and a strong case.
The best plaintiff would be a woman
because a woman would get more sympathy than a man.
And the woman would have to be above reproach
and have done nothing wrong but refuse to give up her seat."
-March 2nd of 1955,
there was a young girl named Claudette Colvin
who was arrested on the bus for refusing to stand up.
And she was taken off the bus bodily by three policemen
and thrown into jail.
-I was very active in Mrs. Parks' youth group.
And I began to think about how unfair we was treated.
They asked me to get up, and I refused.
I could not move because history had me glued to the seat.
It felt like Sojourner Truth's hands
were pushing me down on one shoulder
and Harriet Tubman's hands
were pushing me down on another shoulder.
-Instead of charging her with violating the segregation law,
they charged her with disorderly conduct,
resisting an officer, and assault and battery.
-The NAACP ultimately did not move forward with her case.
At the age of 15, they did not think
that she would make a good witness,
that she would not be reliable.
Some people described her
as being a bit rebellious and feisty.
And Claudette Colvin was a dark-skinned black girl.
There was colorism.
-I was really disappointed.
-There was a lot of emotion
building over this period of time.
The people were just feeling pushed.
Violence on the buses had been going on, too.
And there was a veteran who was killed by a police officer.
-"Treading the tightrope of Jim Crow from birth to death,
from the cradle to the grave is a major mental acrobatic feat.
It takes a noble soul to plumb this line.
There's always a line of some kind -- color line,
hanging rope, tightrope.
To me, it seems that we are puppets on a string
in the white man's hands.
They say we must be segregated from the color line,
yet they pull the strings,
and we perform to their satisfaction
or suffer the consequences if we get out of line."
-There were literally hundreds of incidents on the buses.
There are no black bus drivers, and all bus drivers are armed.
-There was a growing consciousness
that the polite, accommodating, gentle way of getting people
to see the humanity of black people in this community
was not going to be enough.
-The death of Emmett Till --
She knew she could not take it anymore,
see black children killed, see women raped,
see men accosted and mutilated.
It brought a big burden on Auntie Rosa.
-The front of the bus was reserved for white people.
The back of the bus was reserved for black people.
And then there's the middle.
And the middle is kind of a no man's land that black people
are entitled to sit there,
but on the whim of the driver, could be asked to move.
By the terms of Alabama segregation,
all four people in her aisle will have to get up
for this one white person to sit down.
-"The driver said, 'Y'all better make it light on yourselves
and let me have those seats.'
I could not see how standing up was going
to make it light for me.
I thought back to the time when I used to sit up all night
and my grandfather would have his gun right by the fireplace."
"I asked for water to drink.
And as I walked to the fountain,
one yelled, 'Get away from here.
You can't drink water from that fountain.'
I went back to the desk, still very thirsty.
I felt completely alone and desolate,
as if I was descending into a black and bottomless chasm."
"Mr. Nixon asked if I'd be willing
to make my case as a test case against segregation.
I had worked on enough cases to know
that a ruling could not be made without a plaintiff.
So I agreed to be the plaintiff."
-She calls a young, 25-year-old lawyer named Fred Gray
who she knew and had become friends with in the NAACP
to ask him to represent her.
-As president of the Women's Political Council,
I called all the officers of the three chapters.
And I told them that Rosa Parks had been arrested
and she would be tried.
They said, "You have the plans?
Put them into operation."
I didn't go to bed that night.
I cut those stencils.
I ran off 35,000 copies, and I distributed them.
We had worked for at least three years
getting that thing organized.
-Oh, yeah
-Friday, which was the 2nd of December,
it was a typical school day.
I was in ninth grade.
I remember very, very clearly telling us, "You're here
because you're bus riders, and we're depending on you
to take a note home to your parents.
The note tells your parents
that you are not to ride the buses on Monday.
And it's so important that you don't let anybody see this note.
Students, I'm depending on you."
-People were wondering if this was really going to work.
Everybody was doubtful.
We thought that it would cause a lot of problems.
I can remember the fear and the anxiety of people.
-Monday morning, which was the 5th of December,
my dad came home about 7:00.
Boy, was he excited.
I never will forget -- "The buses are empty.
The buses are empty. Oh, they're as clean as Jesus.
Wow, the buses are empty."
We laughed.
I said, "We got to walk. We got to walk.
We got to walk."
We were so excited.
-On the evening of December 5th,
we had a meeting at the Holt Street Baptist Church.
There were thousands of people.
-I remember being given a leaflet
announcing the mass meeting at Holt Street Church.
People showed up from everywhere.
They had to block off streets.
The church had the loudspeaker outside so people could hear.
-It was just packed.
And I did get escorted to the pulpit.
And there were, oh, so many people that -- You can imagine
that many getting in this church.
People were so enthusiastic, and they were so willing.
I did not have to speak, and I didn't speak
because they told me I had said enough.
-Reverend King.
[ Applause ]
-Dr. Martin Luther King,
who had just become the pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church,
he was not well known, and this was his coming-out party.
[ Cheers and applause ]
-He ended up becoming a spokesperson.
He put the boycott in a global perspective.
-There was a vote taken to decide
whether the protest would continue.
And the decision was unanimous.
People were yelling out that they would remain off the buses
until changes were made for the better for us.
-So can you imagine how people must have felt
when they realized, "We did this?
Look, we stood against the threat."
"You want to go on?" "Yes."
-The sun will never go down, go down
The sun will never go down, go down
The flowers...
-They organize a carpool system where they set up
40 pickup stations all around the city,
and the Montgomery Improvement Association
ultimately is coordinating,
like, 10,000 to 15,000 rides per day.
Rosa Parks will serve as a dispatcher for about a month.
-"Riders, go to dispatch and pickup stations
if you want transportation. Don't be rude.
Remember how long some of us
had to wait when the bus passed us
without stopping in the morning and evening.
Drivers, stay on the job.
The riders may create some problems,
but try to be patient with them.
They are making the protest the success it is."
-My dad would every morning, before he'd go to work,
go to one of the pickup stops
and would carry somebody else to work.
-People could go and get in a black-owned taxi
to get to work instead.
Or the workers that were impacted
by not riding the buses had, like, mutual aid
to take care of them and their families
while the economy took the hit.
-Black women were the forefront.
They helped out as fundraisers, organized rides,
cooked food in their home
to make sure that they could sustain the boycott.
-The Women's Political Council had more than 300 members,
and we were organized to the point
that we knew that in a matter of hours,
-...Christian soldiers
Marching as to war
-Months later, the attention that the boycott generated
was unexpected for white people in Montgomery.
They didn't think anybody cared about black people.
-This attracted so much attention
that people came from all over the country.
They sent money, sent clothing, sent shoes, food,
and they sent in enough money
to purchase several station wagons through the churches.
One of the things that made our movement
so very significant,
because we were banding together on a common cause.
As long as we were divided and fearful, we were defeated.
-For several months, Rosa Parks traveled.
She played a key role in helping to fundraise for the boycott.
-We did not have weapons
to go against the power structure,
but our persistence, our patience,
our faith, and our belief in each other
always strengthened our determination
to remain steadfast and united.
-Segregation is an institution of society
we do not intend to see disturbed.
-The White Citizens' Councils
were the kind of respectable version of the Klan.
They were the judges and the lawyers,
and their task was to defend segregation at all costs,
but do so in a way
that presented a kind of look of respectability.
-You are not going to permit the NAACP to control your state.
[ Cheers and applause ]
We are not going to permit our little children
to be used as pawns in a game of power politics
to get the racial vote in Marble City.
[ Cheers and applause ]
-The cities try in all different ways to break the boycott.
There's all sorts of violence. People are throwing things,
including cops, like urine, and they're slashing people's tires.
-A lot of the high-profile leaders --
Martin Luther King
from the Montgomery Improvement Association,
E.D. Nixon from the NAACP --
their houses are bombed.
-And people don't appreciate the kind of violence
that people endured,
and how people would put on their Sunday best
and go places knowing that they were going to get beaten
and bloodied and battered when they got there.
-Fred Gray decided to file a proactive case
into federal court
to start another legal front in challenging bus segregation.
And so he's looking for plaintiffs,
and in the end, four women,
including Claudette Colvin, stepped forward,
which will be called Browder v. Gayle.
Parks is not on that federal case,
partly because of her long political history
with the NAACP as an activist.
Their case went all the way to the Supreme Court, and they won.
-The Montgomery Improvement Association
recommends that the 11-month-old protest
against the city buses will be called off,
and that the Negro citizens of Montgomery, Alabama,
will return to the buses on a nonsegregated basis.
-Freedom
[ Cheers and applause ]
Freedom
-The Montgomery bus boycott
is the most successful boycott in U.S. history.
People have been trying to replicate it for forever.
I think if social movements could understand
the bus boycott, we could win everything.
-I make the rules as I go
Choose my destiny
I follow my dreams
Make no apologies
Fear has no hold on me
Freedom
-All sorts of rumors snake through Montgomery's
white community about Rosa Parks --
that she's an NAACP plant, that she's a Communist plant,
she has a car, she's Mexican,
that she's not even from Montgomery.
-We don't often want to talk about the reprisals.
We don't want to talk about the consequences
and how people make personal sacrifices
in order to advance a broader movement.
-After the incident, I worked five weeks
through the month of December
and was discharged from my job
-The owner of the barbershop on the Air Force base
prohibits all discussion of Rosa Parks
and all discussion of the bus boycott.
And Raymond resigns in protest, thinking
that if he can't defend his wife,
that he's being silenced.
-Dr. King ends up getting the accolades.
He is invited everywhere to speak,
gets an honorarium, makes money, survives.
He's a hero.
-The civil rights groups would have her go out
and speak at events and raise money,
but it never occurred to anybody
that they ought to find some way for them to be supported.
I think that part of the way she was treated
was because she was a woman, therefore taken advantage.
-Montgomery's a smaller town.
People had to know that she was no longer working.
King, none of them offered her a job.
Rosa Parks was also a prideful woman
and would not dare ask.
And I don't think she was the kind of woman
that would think she was owed.
-Auntie Rosa never discussed any hardship.
You would not know she was hungry, for instance.
You wouldn't know that she could not pay this bill.
-They were getting death threats,
and her mother was on the phone
all hours of the night to stop calls from coming in.
-They had to go somewhere because of her safety,
so she called on my father,
and they knew if she called, it was an emergency.
They needed to get her out of there.
-My grandfather, Sylvester McCauley I,
he told her, "Don't worry about any of that. Come up to Detroit.
We will protect you.
We will have more opportunities up here for you.
And, plus, you will be around family that loves you."
-Here, you have this flood of people coming into Detroit
because of the automobile industry, was the magnet.
My goodness, it was like you dropped the plow,
you dispensed with the mule, and headed for Detroit.
However, you had restrictive covenants
that limited the movement of the black people
to just one part of the city.
These are some things that Rosa Parks' brother
understood long before she arrived.
Sylvester, he had already experienced
a lot of these things, so he was able to talk to Rosa
about some of this history and background.
-"I don't know whether I could have been more effective
as a worker for freedom in the South
than I am here in Detroit.
Really the same thing that has occurred in the South
is existing here to a certain degree.
We do have the same problems."
-Blacks in Detroit were relegated
to the worst parts of town,
called Black Bottom and Hastings Street.
But we built homes there, and institutions developed there.
-It was very difficult, to say the least.
So what my grandfather would do, he would just grow his own food.
-My father had a green thumb.
He'd work all day in the Chrysler's plant,
and then he would come home and work a garden.
We grew up on fresh tomatoes, green peppers, onion.
There was enough food in that little plot for him,
grandmother, Auntie Rosa, and Uncle Parks.
-Rosa Parks is a very creative person,
and she would take found items and create stuff out of them --
of course, dresses and ideas of quilts.
-She taught us how to sew.
The stitches were absolutely perfect.
She could tailor anything.
She could look at something and go home and sew it.
-1959 is probably the worst year for the Parks' family.
They record an annual income of $700.
She can't find steady work, Raymond can't find steady work.
In 1960, Jetmagazine will run an exposé
where they describe her
as a tattered version of her former self.
This article leads to people raising money for her
around the country.
They move into a better place to live --
the first floor of a duplex on Virginia Park.
Rosa Parks will get a job in 1961
at the Stockton Sewing Company.
It's basically a glorified sweatshop.
She's doing piecework there.
And Raymond will start to barber around the corner
at the Wildemere Barbershop.
-I opened Vaughn's Bookstore in '59,
the second black bookstore to open in America.
It was a very hot period for black books.
They were just coming into vogue at that particular time.
I met Mrs. Parks when she was a customer.
She and her husband, Raymond,
would walk up to the bookstore on a regular basis,
because we were about 8 or 10 blocks from where she lived.
Every Thursday night, I would have meetings.
Rosa Parks was there, and she was right up on the front seat.
I always talked politics with her,
and I got to know her pretty well,
and also her husband. He was a very fine gentleman.
-You never hear that much about Raymond
because he was a very quiet,
behind-the-scenes kind of individual.
You'll find that Rosa Parks and Raymond Parks are inseparable.
Often, the man is out front,
and you never hear about the wife.
Here, the reverse is true.
-Uncle Parks was willing to let Auntie Rosa step out there
and just do her thing.
He was not the kind of husband
that stood in the way of Auntie Rosa.
She could make any speech, travel where she wanted.
-"I was with the March on Washington in 1963.
That was a great occasion.
But women were not allowed to play much of a role.
-The March on Washington is one example of how
black women are often marginalized
in the civil rights movement.
If you look at those who spoke,
with the exception of Daisy Bates,
who only spoke for a few minutes,
the entire program was dominated by men.
-"There was a tribute to women in which A. Philip Randolph,
one of the organizers of the march,
introduced some of the women
who had participated in the struggle,
and I was one of them."
-They would have her stand up and wave at people --
"There's Rosa Parks. She sat down on the bus in Montgomery.
Wave at them, Rosa Parks, Mrs. Parks."
Then she'd sit down.
They never said anything beyond that.
-I was 15 when I went to the March on Washington.
I stood there in awe of all of the people that had gathered.
And I remember Lena Horne moving swiftly
to the front of the stage,
picked up a microphone, and sung two syllables.
-Freedom
-And they lingered in the air.
There was a blanket of silence.
-There's so much patriarchy built into the movement,
like it's built into so many institutions.
Women raise most of the money, do most of the organizing,
but when you go back and check the record,
those who've been labeled presidents or directors
or the leaders, the Grand Poobah,
largely have been men,
while the women have done the work.
And Mother Parks, she was doing the work.
-[ Speaks indistinctly ]
[ Cheers and applause ]
-By the 1960s, you have this evolving
black liberation struggle in this country,
and Rosa is not at all outside the realm of that,
because she understands the urgency,
the struggle that's going on,
because she identified strongly with young people,
particularly the militant, radical people in the society.
-Malcolm X has come to Detroit,
and he makes it known he wants to meet Rosa Parks.
Malcolm X looked on two people
in the civil rights movement with awe,
and that was Fannie Lou Hamer and Rosa Parks.
-Whenever he had an opportunity to talk about the role of women,
Rosa Parks would be the first thing out of his mouth.
His thing was, you've got to push a little bit harder,
be a bit more aggressive,
take a stronger stance for self-determination,
for independence and liberation in our society.
So Malcolm would see Rosa
as, like, certainly a soldier in all of this.
-She was totally enthralled by the Malcolm idea.
He was so dynamic, he so spoke the truth.
-You and your government
preach one thing and practice another thing.
You say that this is the land of equality,
and 20 million of your black so-called citizens
don't have equality.
-The strength of him and the intelligence of him
and the commitment of him
was right up the alley of Rosa Parks.
-"He had come to Detroit to speak,
and I was sitting in the front row.
His home in New York had been firebombed,
and all his clothes had been damaged by water and smoke,
but he came to Detroit anyway
because he had made a commitment."
-They meet for the last time about a week
before he's assassinated.
-"I spoke to him, and he autographed the program for me.
I had a lot of admiration for him.
He was a very brilliant man.
Dr. King used to say
that black people should receive brutality with love,
and I believed this was a goal to work for,
but I could not reach that point in my mind at all.
Malcolm wasn't a supporter of nonviolence either."
-It's her encounters with Malcolm X
that create what politics looks like for Rosa in the 1960s.
[ Gunshots ]
-The police in Detroit were brutal.
In fact, police brutality that ultimately led
to the Detroit Rebellion in '67, which was at that point,
the largest urban rebellion in U.S. history.
-"The establishment of white people will antagonize
and provoke violence,
and the young people want to present themselves
as human beings and come into their own as men,
there is always something to cut them down."
-The Michigan National Guard on the west side,
they were beating folks
and busting windows out of folks' homes.
On the east side of Detroit, they sent in the 82nd Airborne.
[ Indistinct shouting ]
-Close to 50 people, almost all of them African American,
were killed by the police
and killed by the National Guard.
-During the rebellion time,
three young men were killed at the Algiers Motel.
There was a blackout on news about the incident.
It's obvious nothing was happening, no justice.
-So young militants decide to organize a people's tribunal
to bring the facts of the case to the community,
and they ask Rosa Parks to serve on the jury.
-I was one of the young radicals.
I said, "She's not going to go for this."
I asked her. She says, "Certainly. I'm glad you asked."
We had the tribunal here at the Church of the Black Madonna.
-Jesus was concerned about freedom,
about people coming together,
about the unity of a black people
fighting against the oppression of a white Gentile nation, Rome.
-The Shrine of the Black Madonna
was part of the whole Black Power,
black liberation movement of that period.
First time I met Rosa Parks was in 1967
at the people's trial that was taking place.
-This entire church was packed.
All of us were there to see and witness
her display of what we call the imminence of justice.
-Well, the conclusion was that they were guilty.
They was guilty of murder in the first degree.
-I don't think people understand
how well-trained Mrs. Parks was.
I don't think they understand what a good organizer she was.
I don't think they understand
how long she had been in the struggle,
and I don't think they understood
how radical her understanding
of what the kind of change we need is.
And it's a part of her magic, really, that on the one hand,
she can cultivate this notion of innocence, if you will,
while acting on behalf of and espousing very radical views.
-Politically, we were changing,
and black people were growing in percentage
of the people in Detroit, and they were beginning to think
that we need to have our own people representing us.
They no longer wanted to be represented
primarily by white people.
-It has been made a very bad neighborhood to live in.
We would like to take action
to see this neighborhood cleaned up,
because I'd be afraid to send a child of mine to the store.
-John Conyers, he was a freedom fighter.
Coretta Scott King, she told me
that Mother Parks got her husband
to endorse Congressman John Conyers
for Congress, and he was the only elected official
he ever endorsed.
-Mrs. Parks, she helped him.
He had a difficult time, because the Democratic Party
did not support him in the beginning of his running.
-I think what she did was bring a presence of authenticity.
-She was at meetings,
and she was always there and supported him.
And she helped us in our voting drive,
and we went out and got people registered to vote.
Mrs. Parks was involved in all of that.
She was in it, and we were in it to win it.
-In 1965, John Conyers is elected to Congress,
and the first thing he does is hire Rosa Parks.
-And to my honor and delight, she did accept,
and we were happy to have her in my original staff.
-She has been an activist for over three decades,
she is 52, and this is her first paid political job.
This position comes with health insurance,
which is incredibly important.
-He was in awe of Mother Rosa Parks,
even though she worked for him.
-I had worked on John Conyers' first campaign.
John Conyers came out of a labor movement family.
So there was a lot of hostility toward John Conyers
for being John Conyers,
never mind for hiring Mrs. Parks.
That was kind of throwing gasoline on the fire,
I think, in the eyes of a lot of white people.
-John, he said, "I just want Ms. Parks in my office.
She can do whatever she want to do.
Her name is Rosa Parks."
-The day-to-day answering the phones,
the recording, the note-taking.
Whatever John Conyers asked her, she did.
-She was a humble person.
Rosa Parks essentially had a saint-like quality.
-Conyers told me once that Mother Parks
asked him to reduce her salary because she told him that,
"People keep giving me awards and honors and tributes.
And I feel bad when I have to leave your office
and go pick up these honors."
And John Conyers said, "No, Mrs. Parks.
It's an honor for me that you're working in my office,
and I will not be reducing your salary."
-The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,
father of the nonviolent movement
in the American civil rights struggle,
was killed by an assassin's bullet tonight
in Memphis, Tennessee.
The 39-year-old Nobel Peace Prize winner was hit in the neck
by a bullet as he stood on the balcony of his hotel
and died less than an hour later in a hospital emergency room.
-"I remember my mother and I were listening to the radio.
It was approaching Easter time.
The program was interrupted
to say that Dr. King had been shot.
It was very devastating.
I was lost.
How else can I describe it?
I was deeply grieved.
Mama and I wept quietly together."
-She starts playing Sam Cooke,
"A Change Is Gonna Come," over and over.
-I was born by the river
In a little tent
Oh, and just like the river, I've been running
Ever since
It's been a long
A long time coming, but I know
-"His smooth voice was like medicine to the soul.
It was as if Dr. King was speaking directly to me."
-I rarely saw her show emotion,
but when Dr. King was assassinated,
I saw her cry at his funeral.
-"I was losing the people I love best.
My husband and brother were all sick,
and there was a time when I was traveling every day
to three different hospitals to visit them.
I had to quit working full time and work only part time."
-Auntie Rosa and Uncle Parks loved each other until the end.
As Uncle Parks' health deteriorated,
the loving way that she would take care of him.
They were so closely joined together.
-"Parks died in 1977, when he was 74,
after a five-year struggle against cancer.
My brother Sylvester died three months
after that, also of cancer.
Mama was ill with cancer, too.
I cared for her at home until she died at the age of 91."
-Dearborn is a predominantly white affluent suburb,
home to the Ford Motor Company,
but many of the people who work in Dearborn
come from Detroit, 63% black.
-The Dearborn boycott really started where a black family
had gone into a Dearborn park to have a picnic.
A white family showed up and said,
"Well, you're not residents of Dearborn,
so you can't use this park."
So the white family went to the city council of Dearborn
and got them to pass an ordinance
to restrict nonresidents from using a public park.
In other words, black folks, don't use our parks.
Mrs. Parks was participating
in the discussion, and we said, "Well, hell,
let's boycott Dearborn."
So it's almost like the bus boycott.
There's this photograph of Mrs. Parks and I
going to this news conference,
and it became front-page news.
When Rosa Parks was asked by the media,
"Do you support this boycott?"
she said, "I support this boycott 100%."
The boycott went from the local courts
all the way up to the Michigan Supreme Court.
It was ruled unconstitutional.
We won.
And once again,
Mrs. Parks was on the right side of history.
-These days, there still seems to be
a kind of feeling of hostility around Alabama
sometimes towards blacks and around the South towards blacks.
-And also in the North, and wherever we go.
-Yeah. -Listen, I can't say why
because it is another question that has to be answered
by those people who have that attitude,
why they have it.
-After the Dearborn boycott, I put my hat in the ring
to run for the president of the Detroit NAACP.
And I asked Rosa Parks if she would be my running mate.
She agreed.
-"I have been a member of the NAACP since 1943.
I believed, and still do,
that the invitation to become a member of the board
will allow me to give some direction
to the activities of the Detroit branch."
-They put a campaign together.
Got a prominent minister to run on another slate.
They were afraid of our activism.
And the thing that was so hilarious
as we were campaigning...
these old-ass men would say,
"Rosa Parks is too old
to be officer in the NAACP."
And my retort would be, "She's traveling all over
the world being Rosa Parks,"
and they could hardly walk up the steps.
-"Instead of spending so much energy
on an internal power struggle,
we should be concerned with what we should be doing
about increased racism with the rise of the New Right.
Our energy should be focused on responses
and not on whose name appears on the NAACP stationary."
-And they defeated us, but they didn't control Rosa Parks.
-"I hope to someday see an end to the conditions in our country
that make people want to hurt others."
-The kind of compassion she had for people
who were struggling was really refined.
She was led by a compassionate heart
to do really difficult things.
Challenging things.
-One night, a young man broke into Rosa Parks' apartment
and attempting to rob the house.
-This man threatened her and physically beat her.
-Struck me on this side of the face
and on that side of the face and a little scar up there.
-And she fought back. By herself.
-Caught hold of his shirt that way
and pushed him off of me the best I could.
-She was elderly. 5'1".
100 pounds soaking wet.
She came out fighting on this guy,
and I believe that saved her life.
She had to go to the hospital, and she recovered.
Very painful again because...
I still, to this day,
don't understand how she was by herself.
Many people offered her money, gifts, everything,
and she turned them all down
because she was not a person that wanted things.
She wanted you to be okay
and fairly treated. That's it.
She didn't want that extra stuff.
She didn't want the awards. She didn't want the money.
She didn't want the fame.
What she did was, she forgave the man.
The media asked her, "Well, how could this happen?
What happened after?" She said, "I already forgave him.
Just don't do it again."
-She takes things in stride,
and she moved on.
-Just want to get everything over with it and...
-Yes, and get back to my job, what I'm doing.
[ Laughs ]
-Rosa Parks, alongside a longtime friend
and fellow activist, Elaine Steele,
decide to found the Rosa and Raymond Parks
Institute for Self Development
to really cultivate young people's leadership,
young people's vision.
-The gift that Ms. Parks gives
is the decades-long transitions
of what your role can
and should look like as times shift,
as conditions change.
-I welcome this opportunity to lend my support to freeing
South African natives
and freeing those imprisoned political prisoners
and all that goes to make it a free country.
-Nelson Mandela walked out of jail
and into a South Africa facing rapid,
some say frightening, change.
-While he was in prison, he said he was reading about her,
and her courage meant so much to him.
In 1990, Nelson Mandela came to Detroit,
one of the cities he visited after his release
following 27 years of imprisonment in South Africa.
There was a line of VIPs greeting him
as he came to what was then Tiger Stadium.
Mother Parks was added at the last minute,
so she was at the end of the line.
Nelson Mandela looked up,
saw Mother Parks at the end of that row.
He rushed down with his arms outstretched.
"Rosa, Rosa, Rosa!"
And held her so tight it lifted her up off the ground.
She was slightly built.
That exuberant response from Nelson Mandela
meant everything about who was a real celebrity
among that list of VIPs.
[ Applause ]
-"I've never gotten used to being a public person.
I have more honorary degrees than I can count.
Interviewers still only want to talk
about that one evening in 1955
when I refused to give up my seat on the bus."
"I understand that I am a symbol."
-There were times when I would be very discouraged,
but I always remembered that, deep within, there's a spirit
that is beyond my physical strength.
-Her whole being was dedicated to God.
She was highly spiritual,
highly understanding of purpose,
and that we have a life to serve.
[ Women singing indistinctly ]
During the last couple years of her life,
me and my father, we would go see her,
and her caretaker would be there with a smile
on her face, saying, "Oh, come on in.
Your Auntie Rosa asked about y'all."
-Yes, I was with her when she passed.
I grabbed her hand, and I said, "Rosie, Rosie."
And it was a doctor there.
And she came, and she said, "She's gone."
-I was born by the river
In a little tent
-When Mother Parks joined the ancestors,
the Bible was open on her chest to the 23rd Psalm.
That says everything.
-What does the 23rd Psalm say?
-"The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures.
He leads me beside the still waters.
He restores my soul.
He leads me in the path of righteousness
for his name's sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil.
For thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of my enemies.
Surely goodness and mercy shall comfort me
all the days of my life.
And I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever."
-Her body is flown to Montgomery.
There is a massive celebration of her life there.
Her body is then flown to D.C.
-Glory
Glory, glory
-She becomes the first woman,
the first civilian, the second African American
to lie in honor in the nation's capital.
-Hallelujah
-President George Bush and 40,000 Americans
come and pay tribute to her.
It's really an unprecedented honor.
I mean, nothing like this happened for Martin Luther King.
Her body is then flown to Detroit.
-Put your hands together and show your love
for Sister Rosa Parks.
[ Cheers and applause ]
Show your love.
She sat down to test the law!
She was a freedom fighter.
A seamstress.
That's irrelevant.
She didn't get locked up for sewing.
She was a militant!
-I'll never forget that.
And -- Oh, boy.
That was a great time of remembrance of a great lady.
-The whole city showed up.
The whole world showed up for Mother Rosa Parks...
which was wonderful.
-Ladies and gentlemen, the statue of Rosa Parks.
[ Applause ]
-Rosa Parks simply did what was natural.
She was tired, so she sat down.
Today, we will remember with admiration
the simple act of a brave woman.
-There's a convenience in making it small --
a small act, an innocent act.
I believe when we devoid it of strategy,
we create an environment where it's easy to fix racism.
-On the day that Rosa Parks' statue
was erected in the Capitol,
the Supreme Court was hearing oral argument
in Shelby v. Holder, the Voting Rights --
1965 Voting Rights Act law,
to decide whether it was still constitutional.
-This was a very big deal.
Remember what a moment in history it was
when Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act.
And now the Supreme Court said, "You know what?
Times have changed. The old South is gone.
These days of systematic exclusion of Blacks are over."
-The Court gut the Voting Rights Act.
The irony in that is Rosa Parks
was at the march from Selma to Montgomery,
which was part of the move
to get the Voting Rights Act of 1965
passed in the first place.
And here they are, in fact,
enhancing voter suppression on that same day.
-It erased her whole political history
from the 1930s, really, until the eve of her death.
It erased the fact that she was part of a movement
that was considered a threat to the United States.
-And so a statue was the way
we were going to remember the civil rights movement.
And so she gets trapped in this image of this long-ago problem
that we had in this country.
And in many ways, the statute reduced
and trapped what her legacy actually asks of us.
-She was very mindful of the ways in which,
despite the activism in the 1950s and '60s,
we had not made the progress that she'd hoped for.
-Fighting for voting rights
is about fighting for the right to participate in democracy.
-The struggle has many parts.
-Hands up! Don't shoot! Hands up!
-It is a struggle which requires a use of direct action.
-Don't shoot! Hands up! Don't shoot!
-Each generation has to make its own dent
in the wall of injustice.
-Rosa Parks never gave up that torch.
She lit the torch to the next generation.
-We will continue to show our strength in numbers.
-When you think back on it, if you had to do it
all over again, would you do it?
-Yes, I would.
As far as I can remember during my lifetime,
I resisted the idea of being mistreated
and pushed around because of my race.
And I felt that all people should be free
regardless of their color.
And when the driver demanded that we give up this seat,
I felt that the time had come to not take it anymore.
I had had enough, and this was truly the end
of being pushed around.
-Yeah
-Please, Lord, won't you bind my hands
'Cause I don't wanna hurt nobody
Oh, Lord, won't you guide my soul
'Cause I don't wanna act ungodly
Oh, Lord, won't you help my soul?
These heathens want to steal my faith
I really need some self-control
I'm trying not to fall from grace
Lord, please won't you help my soul
Come strengthen my faith
Strengthen my faith
-Yeah
Yeah