Rosa Parks
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C H A P T E R
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Rosa Parks managed to care for her mother for two years while working full time. In 1979, ninety-one-year-old Leona McCauley died. Rosa Parks was nearing seventy. Now, she was all alone.
In 1979 Rosa Parks was given an award called the Spingarn Medal by the NAACP for her civil rights work. She also won the Martin Luther King Jr.
Nonviolent Peace Prize.
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She kept on working and overcoming her loneliness. Then, her friendship with Elaine Steel grew more important.
The teenager she had met years before at the sewing machines was now like a daughter.
Elaine Steele helped Parks realize she would soon have to retire. Parks needed to develop new interests. At Steele’s urging, Parks attended aerobics classes and studied holistic health.
The project that was most important to Rosa Parks now was the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development. Students at the Institute were urged to develop to their full potential. A program called Pathways to Freedom took students on tours around the United States.
Rosa Parks and Elaine Steele took a group of students to see the place where 51
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the Selma to Montgomery March took place. They also visited sites along the Underground Railroad. These sites were safe houses where fleeing slaves hid out.
During the times of slavery, they hid while on their way to freedom in Canada.
Parks wanted these young people to know their heritage. She wanted them to understand the sacrifices black people made before them. These sacrifices were made so that they could have more equality in their lives.
Thousands of young people from all over the United States took these Pathways to Freedom tours in the 1980s.
In 1988 at age seventy-four, Rosa Parks retired from Congressman Conyers’ office. Her eyesight was poor.
She was growing very tired. She knew 52
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she could no longer give her job the energy it deserved.
Rosa Parks never did anything half way. She needed to give her all. But, her age was now catching up with her.
Rosa Parks was always interested in young people. She believed the job of the adult world was to show young people the way and to inspire them. She wanted to make the world a better place for the next generation.
To reach out to young people, Rosa Parks became an author. She wrote several books. The first book was titled My Story. It told how Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on that bus. It was about how this led to the bus boycott and the end of bus segregation. She wrote in her own simple, direct way.
Rosa Parks wrote the book Quiet Strength to share her philosophy of life 53
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with youth. The book talked about the things that were very important to Parks. She wrote of her own religious faith and the values she held dear. She also wrote about the need to be determined to do your best.
For many years, children and young people wrote letters to Rosa Parks.
Sometimes they were having problems in their own lives. They wanted her advice. Sometimes they were just curious about how Rosa Parks felt when she was sent to jail.
Parks gathered many of these letters.
From them, she wrote her third book, Dear Mrs. Parks. She included the letters of the young people and her answers to them.
One young writer wanted to know why racism still continued to exist in the 54
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world. He could not understand why some people disliked others just because their skin was a different color.
Rosa Parks told the boy that
everybody has to work together for a better world. She said that God created all people no matter what color they were.
For the first time in Rosa Parks’ life, she had enough money to be
comfortable. She had always struggled to make ends meet.
The royalties from her books, although not great, were enough to pay her bills. She even had a little left over.
Rosa Parks was surprised to find that she had enough money that she did not have to worry anymore.
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Rosa Parks never took a trip outside the United States until she was eighty years old. Then, she was invited to go to Japan and speak to the young people there. Rosa Parks was wondering if the youth of Japan really knew who she was.
When she arrived in Japan she was amazed to see eight thousand Japanese children lining the streets to greet her.
They all were singing “We Shall Overcome,” the famous civil rights hymn used in many of the marches.
When Parks returned to the United States, she spoke at schools all over the country. She enjoyed talking to children and hearing their hopes and dreams for the future. Rosa Parks lived in a Detroit apartment alone. One night a terrible thing happened.
She was getting ready for bed when a young black man broke into the 56
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apartment. The man asked Parks for money. She went to her purse to get him some money. Then, he began to hit her.
He punched her in the face many times.
Parks tried to fight the man off.
Finally, he knocked her down and took all of her money, about one hundred dollars.
Rosa Parks called Elaine Steele for help. She lived close by. She came over quickly. The police came and Parks was taken to the hospital. Luckily, she was not badly hurt. She said she did not hate the young man who had attacked her.
She could not hate anybody.
After the attack, Rosa Parks moved to a more secure apartment. But, she did not go into seclusion. She kept on visiting schools and talking to young people. In one school in Philadelphia, 57
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the children chanted her name as she drove up. The children listened attentively to what she had to say.
In 1996 President Bill Clinton gave Rosa Parks the Medal of Freedom. In 1999 she received the Congressional Gold Medal.
President Clinton told the audience that when he was a little boy he had read in the newspaper about this brave woman. She was the woman who
refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. He said he was inspired by Rosa Parks’ courage when he was a boy. Now, he was proud to honor her.
In December 2000 the Rosa Parks Library and Museum opened at Troy State University in Montgomery, Alabama. The museum is on the exact 58
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spot where Rosa Parks was arrested that day in 1955.
In 2002 a movie was made about Rosa Parks. It was called Ride to Freedom: The Rosa Parks Story.
The Rosa Parks Library and Museum in Montgomery, Alabama.
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C H A P T E R
10
Rosa Parks was confined to a
wheelchair in her later years. But, she continued to speak out on civil rights issues. She was an ordinary woman, a seamstress who never thought she would become famous.
Her act of courage and dignity that day in Montgomery changed history.
For decades, black men and women had been forced to sit in the backs of the buses. They had to accept rudeness and humiliation throughout the South.
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But one quiet, gentle woman took a chance. She risked her safety and her livelihood. For that, equality was advanced.
Rosa Parks died in 2005 at the age of ninety-two. She was a nonviolent revolutionary who made the United States a more just society. She did not do it for money or for fame. Neither of these had much meaning to her. She did it for the simple reason that it was the right thing to do. She did it to make the world a better place.
&nbs
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B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Brinkley, Douglas. Rosa Parks.
Thorndike, Maine: Thorndike
Press, 2000.
Rosa Parks, Quiet Strength. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing
House, 1994.
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G L O S S A R Y
accuse: to charge with fault modest
or guilt
humiliate: to cause a person a attentively: carefully
painful loss of pride
bail: money paid for the release injustice: an unjust or of someone from jail
unfair act
chapter: a branch or part of mourn: to express sorrow an organization
or grief
comrade: a person who shares parole: the release of a person one’s activities or job; a
from jail before the end of
friend
the sentence
controversial: problematic; ridicule: to put down or causing discussion or
make fun of
disagreement
royalties: a part of the money courteous: polite
that is earned from the
production of something that
criticizing: putting down is given to the person who
deaconess: a female leader in a created it
church; often a woman who
seamstress: a woman who sews works to help the poor
for a living
efficient: performing in the best seclusion: in hiding; away possible way with the least
from society
waste of time
trolley: a car used for public federal: having to do with the transportation
national government
unconstitutional: in violation heritage: background; ancestry of or not following the U.S.
holistic health: an alternative Constitution
to scientific medicine
humble: not self-promoting; 63
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I N D E X
Abernathy, Ralph, 30
Montgomery Industrial
American Methodist
School, 9
Episcopalian (AME), 43
National Association for the
Civil War, 10
Advancement of Colored
Clinton, Bill, 58
People (NAACP), 18, 20,
Conyers, John, 41, 42, 43,
21, 23, 24, 29, 39, 50
48, 49, 52
Parks, Raymond, 12, 13, 14,
Crittenden’s Tailor Shop, 20
15, 16, 23, 28, 29, 35,
Detroit, Michigan, 19, 38,
48, 49
39, 40, 43, 45, 47, 56
Raymond Parks Institute for
Eason-Steele, Elaine, 40, 41,
Self Development, 51
51, 57
Russell Field Flight
Highlander Folk School, 22,
School, 17
23
Scottsboro Boys, 13, 15, 16
King, Martin Luther, 23, 30,
Springarn Medal, 50
34, 37, 41, 42, 46,
White, Alice L., 9, 10
47, 50
World War II, 17
Ku Klux Klan, 6, 7
McCauley, James, 5
McCauley, Leona, 5, 6, 35,
49, 50
McCauly, Sylvester, 6, 17,
18, 19, 39, 49
Montgomery Improvement
Association (MIA), 31,
32, 33
Montgomery, Alabama, 4, 5,
8, 10, 11, 12, 17, 18, 19,
20, 21, 22, 23, 29, 30,
31, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38,
40, 44, 45, 52, 58, 60
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Document Outline
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Glossary
Index