Rosa Lee McCauley Parks, dead at the age of 92.
Parks, reportedly died around 7 p.m. Monday at St. John Hospital on Detroit's east side. Parks' refusal to give up her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery, Ala., in 1955 landed her in jail and sparked a bus boycott that is considered the start of the modern civil rights movement. The bus is on display at the Henry Ford Museum, Dearborn. Parks, was born Feb. 4, 1913, in Tuskegee, Ala. She lived in Detroit.
http://www.e-portals.org/Parks/
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Rosa wrote her autobiography in 1992...(possibly 90 or 94...conflicting reports about that...
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Read her story
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Her quotes:
All I was doing was trying to get home from work. - Rosa Parks
Each person must live their life as a model for others. - Rosa Parks
Have you ever been hurt and the place tries to heal a bit, and you just pull the scar off of it over and over again. - Rosa Parks
Memories of our lives, of our works and our deeds will continue in others. - Rosa Parks
My only concern was to get home after a hard day's work. - Rosa Parks
Whatever my individual desires were to be free, I was not alone. There were many others who felt the same way. - Rosa Parks
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Factoid:
Parks and some of her family members, fired by their employers or continually harassed by angry whites, decided in 1957 to move to Detroit, Michigan. There they had a great deal of difficulty finding jobs, but Parks was finally employed by John Conyers, an African American member of the U.S. House of Representatives. She served as his receptionist and then staff assistant for 25 years while continuing her work with the NAACP and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and serving as a deaconess at the Saint Matthew African Methodist Episcopal Church.
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Some people say Emmett Till's murder sparked the modern Civil Rights Movement. Probably both are true.
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http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/till/peopleevents/p_till.html
Young Emmett's personality was infectious. "He loved to tell jokes," said his cousin, Wheeler Parker. "He would pay people to tell him jokes."
In the summer of 1955, Emmett had just turned 14. He and his friends were enjoying the summer and dancing to a new music called rock and roll. "The boys wore crepe-soled shoes, polyester pants and the girls wore skirts with the crinoline underneath. You must have the crinoline," said Cooksie Magnolia, who grew up with Emmett on the same street. "Young girls wore flared skirts so when their male partners spun them around, their skirts would have that extra flare."
"That was a good time because where we grew up, a lot of guys listened to the Moonglows, the Coasters, the Flamingos and the Spaniels," said Richard Heard, one of Emmett's classmates. "We'd try to imitate them in our little singing groups. It was a lot of fun."
One afternoon, Heard was invited to Emmett's house for bologna sandwiches and Kool-Aid. They were all looking forward to returning to school together in the fall where they would complete eighth grade and move on to high school. Heard never knew that would be the last time he would see his friend alive.
"Emmett was a funny guy all the time. He had a suitcase of jokes that he liked to tell," said Heard. "He loved to make people laugh. He was a chubby kid; most of the guys were skinny, but he didn't let that stand in his way. He made a lot of friends at McCosh Grammar School where we went to school."
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Just months after Emmett Till's murder, Look magazine published "The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi," in which Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam confessed to the crime. Journalist William Bradford Huie recalled the interview:
![I met Milam and Bryant.We had this strange situation. We're meeting in the library of this law firm. Milam and Bryant are sitting on one side of the table, [lawyer] John Whitten and I sitting on the other side. I'm not doing the questioning. Their own lawyer is doing the questioning. And he's never heard their story. Not once. He becomes as interested in the story as I am. I said, ''Now I'm going to take notes and then during the day I'm going to do two things. I'm going to be roughing out this story, and I'm also going where you say you went, and I'm going to find evidence.'' Milam did most of the talking. Now remember, he's older. Milam was then thirty-five or thirty-six. He was a first lieutenant in the U.S. Army reserve at that time. And so Milam was a bit more articulate than Bryant was. Bryant did some talking, particularly when they talked about what they were told had happened in the store. But J. W. Milam did the killing. He fired the shot when they took Till down on the river and killed him.](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/till/sfeature/images/sf_look_intro_quote.gif)
