Obama pays tribute to Rosa Parks on anniversary of arrest

Clinton will speak from the same pulpit at Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church where King preached his Sunday sermons as pastor of the church from 1954 to 1960.

The events of December 1, 1955 made Parks an worldwide icon, and brought notoriety to Martin Luther King, Jr, then a little-known minister of a church in Montgomery who would grow into one of the nation’s great civil rights leaders.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke Tuesday on the anniversary of Rosa Parks’ Dec. 1, 1955 arrest for refusing to give her bus seat to a white passenger. In response, the city’s Black community, led by Martin Luther King Jr., organized the famous Montgomery bus boycott.

DART announced at the press conference commemorating Parks that two new plaques will soon be placed at Parks’ namesake plaza.

“Rosa Parks held no elected office”.

Dr. Felicia Bell is the Director of the Rosa Parks Museum.

He is looking, he says, for an opportunity to “remind us how people can be part of a movement”.

National Public Radio teamed up with ASU for the 60th anniversary of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, hosting a community conversation that will be broadcast during Michel Martin’s radio series “Going There”.

Within a decade of Parks’ refusal to move to the back of the bus, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would become law, outlawing discrimination based on race, creed, gender or national origin. He’s in Birmingham for a fundraiser. Even though the Klu Klux Klan did everything they could to run his family out of town, as he says, he just couldn’t turn his back on 50,000 people. She was determined to hear Clinton’s speech, she said, because a woman’s campaign for the presidency of the United States seemed like a civic bookend to Rosa Parks’s action 60 years earlier. “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”. Clinton later said she had written President Obama urging him to award a Presidential Medal of Freedom to Gray.

“It took the courage of so many, and among the most courageous were the lawyers who took on the challenges in the courts and in the streets”, Clinton said of civil rights leaders who were also attorneys, noting that she is herself a “recovering lawyer”. “I got on it to go home”, Parks has said.

FILE -Rosa Parks arrives at circuit court to be arraigned in the racial bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, Feb. 24, 1956. A collection of documents from Ms. Parks’s life, now on loan at the Library of Congress, contains a paper bag from the 1990s covered in the elderly civil rights activist’s scrawl that reads “The Struggle Continues” over and over again.