Simon Wiesenthal Center & Museum of Tolerance Mourns Passing of Civil Rights Icon, Rosa Parks

October 26, 2005

MUSEUM OF TOLERANCE MOURNS PASSING OF CIVIL RIGHTS ICON, ROSA PARKS

The Museum of Tolerance mourns the passing of Rosa Parks and is honored to pay tribute to her in special events for public visitors and school students over the coming months.

The Bible—a source of inspiration for the civil rights movement—tells us that "a woman of valor" is "worth far more than rubies." Rosa Parks was such a woman. Born in Alabama in 1908, the daughter of a carpenter and school teacher, Rosa Parks changed history on December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, when she was coming home from a long day’s work as a seamstress. She refused to move to the back of the bus and give up her seat to a white man, sparking the Montgomery Boycott, the career of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and the nonviolent protest movement that ultimately ended Jim Crow segregation.

"All I was doing was trying to get home from work," she later said. Her modesty hid the truth. In 1955, she already had a history of involvement with the NAACP and African American voter registration efforts. In 1957—threatened with retaliation for her civil rights activism—she moved to Detroit and later cofounded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development to put into action her credo that "each person must live life as model to others." Her husband of 45 years, Raymond Parks, died in 1977.

Rosa Parks remained active in the cause of civil rights well into her eighties. In 1999, she was awarded the Congressional Medal of Freedom. On hearing of her death, Georgia Congressman John Lewis, inspired as a teenager by the Montgomery Bus Boycott to get involved in civil rights, said: "It was so unbelievable that this woman—this one woman—had the courage to take a seat and refuse to get up and give it up. . . . By sitting down, she was standing up for all Americans."

 FAMILY SUNDAY at the Museum of Tolerance on December 4, 2005, will feature a program dedicated to the legacy of Rosa Parks, on the 50^th  anniversary of her historic act of courage. For more information, call 310 772-2526.

Photo: Rosa Parks at the Museum of Tolerance, 1998, at a program commemorating the 100th birthday of Paul Robeson.  Shown here with Wiesenthal Center, Associate Dean, Rabbi Abraham Cooper and program participant.