Remembering a true Heroine:
Rose Parks -- 1913-2005
Henry Munangatire
Issue date: 11/10/05 Section: Op-Ed
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By Henry M.D. Munangatire
The TARTAN
The twenty fourth of October two thousand and five is a day that will go down in history. Although this day dark fills the heart of many with sadness, the world will remember this day as the day America lost a brave, gallant and fearless woman of grace.
The United States Congress has called her "The Mother of Modern Day Civil Rights Movement". She fought tirelessly to rid her people of oppression and injustice. On the first day of December 1955, Mrs. Rosa Parks was going home on the bus after a long and tiring day at Montgomery Fair department store in Montgomery, Alabama.
She was sitting in the colored section of the bus; blacks were to sit in the rear of the bus in a small section which might have existed of four rows of seats.
The law was that black people were to sit in the back of the bus and if the white seats were fully occupied and a white person walked in they were to give up their seat for that person.
The reverse of that would happen if all the black seats were taken and there were vacant white seats, blacks would stand in the aisle even though there were vacant seats. There was no exception to this law even thought black people constituted 75% of the bus system's passengers. Segregation on the transport system was so bad that blacks were not allowed to sit across from whites.
It was on this day that Rosa Parks after boarding the bus seated in the 'colored' section was asked to move by the bus driver along with four other black people to accommodate white people who were standing because on this particular day white section was fully occupied. The three other blacks moved including the man seated beside her, in her defiance she made space and moved towards the window.
Looking back in hindsight to that moment in history Rosa Parks stood for what she believed in. She became a true liberator for African- Americans and all those oppressed by the legal system in this country. Furthermore, she facilitated and ignited the fire that further lit the civil rights movement. She was arrested on that day and charged with violation of chapter 6, section 11 segregation law of Montgomery City code.
The TARTAN
The twenty fourth of October two thousand and five is a day that will go down in history. Although this day dark fills the heart of many with sadness, the world will remember this day as the day America lost a brave, gallant and fearless woman of grace.
The United States Congress has called her "The Mother of Modern Day Civil Rights Movement". She fought tirelessly to rid her people of oppression and injustice. On the first day of December 1955, Mrs. Rosa Parks was going home on the bus after a long and tiring day at Montgomery Fair department store in Montgomery, Alabama.
She was sitting in the colored section of the bus; blacks were to sit in the rear of the bus in a small section which might have existed of four rows of seats.
The law was that black people were to sit in the back of the bus and if the white seats were fully occupied and a white person walked in they were to give up their seat for that person.
The reverse of that would happen if all the black seats were taken and there were vacant white seats, blacks would stand in the aisle even though there were vacant seats. There was no exception to this law even thought black people constituted 75% of the bus system's passengers. Segregation on the transport system was so bad that blacks were not allowed to sit across from whites.
It was on this day that Rosa Parks after boarding the bus seated in the 'colored' section was asked to move by the bus driver along with four other black people to accommodate white people who were standing because on this particular day white section was fully occupied. The three other blacks moved including the man seated beside her, in her defiance she made space and moved towards the window.
Looking back in hindsight to that moment in history Rosa Parks stood for what she believed in. She became a true liberator for African- Americans and all those oppressed by the legal system in this country. Furthermore, she facilitated and ignited the fire that further lit the civil rights movement. She was arrested on that day and charged with violation of chapter 6, section 11 segregation law of Montgomery City code.