Clinton on Montgomery Bus Boycott, 60th Anniversary, Rubio visits Alabama

Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton returned to Alabama for a tribute to Rosa Parks and the lawyers behind the Montgomery Bus Boycott on Tuesday.

“Because Rosa Parks kept her seat, thousands of ordinary commuters walked instead of rode”, President Barrack Obama said Tuesday in a statement.

Terri Lee Freeman, the president of the National Civil Rights Museum, said Parks’ legacy impacted all, especially the freedoms that young people enjoy today.

“While reserving a seat on each bus in her name may seem like a small gesture”, noted Bassett,”it recognizes the important contribution this fearless woman made so that people of all colors could be treated with dignity, respect and empathy”. When the bus began to fill up, the driver told Parks to give up her seat to a white passenger, she refused and was subsequently arrested. She was coming home from work, and she was exhausted. Parks refused to abide by this practice on multiple occasions and as a result was removed from the buses. “I thought we solved that problem thanks to numerous lawyers we are honoring today, but unfortunately there is mischief afoot, and some people are just determined to do what they can to keep other Americans from voting”. The city, faced with bad publicity and the loss of huge sums of money from bus fares, buckled. And we’ve seen it most recently with critics who question activists’ embrace of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Laquan McDonald and other victims of police brutality in search of a more flawless victim. It’s a narrative that many critics of the Black Lives Matter like to trot out as an example of peaceful, respectful movement toward change.

Rosa Parks died in 2005 at the age of 92 after a lifetime of committing herself to the movement for civil and social justice in the United States. Neither was that moment – unscripted though it was – truly a spontaneous bursting of the dams of tension that led to the Black community finally standing up and demanding equal treatment.

Crump told the crowd that working on cases like those is a way for attorneys to continue taking an active role in the struggle for civil rights equality.

“The only exhausted I was”, she said later, “was exhausted of giving in”.

And learning from a leader who once sat in a classroom just like them. Colvin joined four other plaintiffs in the court case Browder v. Gayle, challenging the constitutionality of the bus segregation ordinances of Montgomery. “Across the country many police officers are out there every day inspiring trust and confidence honorably doing their duty, putting themselves on the line, to save lives and many police departments are deploying creative and effective strategies demonstrating how we can protect the public without resorting to unnecessary force”, said Clinton.

As soon as they heard of Parks’ arrest, Women’s Political Committee leader Jo Ann Robinson and veteran trade unionist E. D. Nixon set about mobilising a community-wide boycott of the buses.