Rosa Parks |
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Rosa "Lee" Louise McCauley Parks (February 4, 1913–October 24, 2005) was an African American civil rights activist and seamstress whom the United States Congress dubbed the "Mother of the Modern Day Civil Rights Movement".
Parks is famous for her refusal in 1955 to obey a bus driver's demand that she give up her bus seat to a white passenger. Her subsequent arrest and trial for this act of civil disobedience ignited the Montgomery Bus Boycott, one of the largest and most successful mass movements against racial segregation in history, and launched Martin Luther King, Jr., one of the organizers of the boycott, to the forefront of the civil rights movement. Her role in American history earned her an iconic status in American culture, and her actions have left an enduring legacy for worldwide civil rights movements.
Rosa Parks was born Rosa Louise McCauley in Tuskegee, Alabama, the daughter of James and Leona McCauley, a carpenter and a teacher. Small even as a child, she suffered poor health and had chronic tonsillitis. When her parents separated, she moved with her mother to Pine Level, Alabama, just outside Montgomery. There she grew up on a farm with her maternal grandparents, mother, and younger brother Sylvester, and began her lifelong membership in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Her mother Leona homeschooled Rosa until she was 11, when she enrolled in the Industrial School for Girls in Montgomery, where her aunt lived, taking academic and some vocational courses. She then went on to a laboratory school set up by the Alabama State Teachers College for Negroes for secondary education (now known as Alabama State University), but was forced to drop out to care for her grandmother, and later her mother after she grew ill.
Under Jim Crow laws, it was quite easy to separate black and white people in every aspect of daily life in the South, except for public transportation. Bus and train companies could not afford separate vehicles for different races, and so black and white people had to occupy the same space. Bus transportation was one of the most volatile areas for race relations in the South. Parks recalled going to elementary school in Pine Level, where school buses took white students to their new school and black students had to walk to their school: "I'd see the bus pass every day . . . But to me, that was a way of life; we had no choice but to accept what was the custom. The bus was among the first ways I realized there was a black world and a white world."
Though Parks' autobiography recounts that some of her earliest memories are of the kindness of white strangers, her situation made it impossible to ignore racism. When the Ku Klux Klan marched in the street in front of her house, Parks recalls her grandfather guarding the front door with a shotgun. The Montgomery Industrial School, founded and staffed by white Northerners for black children, was twice burned by arsonists, and its faculty was ostracized by the white community.
In 1932, she married Raymond Parks, a barber from Montgomery, at her mother's house. Raymond was a member of the NAACP, at the time collecting money to support the Scottsboro Boys, a group of black people falsely accused of raping two white women. After her marriage, Rosa took a number of jobs, ranging from domestic worker to hospital aide. At her husband's urging, she finished her high school studies in 1933, at a time when less than seven percent of African Americans had a high school diploma. Despite the Jim Crow laws that made political participation by black people difficult, she succeeded in registering to vote on her third try.
In December 1943, Parks became active in the American Civil Rights Movement, joined the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP, and was elected volunteer secretary to its president, Edgar Nixon. Of her position, she later said, "I was the only woman there, and they needed a secretary, and I was too timid to say no." She would continue as secretary until 1957. In the 1940s, Parks and her husband were also members of the Voters' League. Some time soon after 1944, she held a brief job on the Maxwell Air Force Base, a federally-owned area where racial segregation was not allowed, and rode on an integrated trolley. Speaking to her biographer, Parks noted, "You might just say Maxwell opened my eyes up." Parks also worked as a housekeeper and seamstress for a white couple, Clifford and Virginia Durr. The politically liberal Durrs became her friends, and encouraged Parks to attend, and eventually helped sponsor her in, the Highlander Folk School, an education center for workers' rights and racial equality in Monteagle, Tennessee, in the summer of 1955.
One of the reasons for the desegregation Parks experienced on Maxwell AFB was that she was not the first African American to refuse to give up her seat to a white person. In 1944 Jackie Robinson took a similar stand with an Army officer in Fort Hood, Texas, refusing to move to the back of a bus. He was brought before a court-martial, which acquitted him.[1]
The NAACP had accepted and litigated other cases before, such as that of Irene Morgan ten years earlier, which resulted in a victory in the Supreme Court on Commerce Clause grounds. That victory, however, only overturned state segregation laws as they applied to travel in interstate commerce, such as interstate bus travel. Black leaders had begun to build a case around the arrest of a 15-year-old girl, Claudette Colvin, who had refused to relinquish her bus seat. Colvin was a student at Booker T. Washington High School. On March 2, 1955, she boarded a public bus. Colvin was handcuffed, arrested and forcibly removed from the bus when she refused to give up her seat to a white man. She screamed that her constitutional rights were being violated. At the time, Colvin was active in the NAACP's Youth Council, and she was advised by none other than Rosa Parks.
Colvin recollected, "Mrs. Parks said, 'always do what was right.' " Parks was raising money for Colvin's defense, but when E.D. Nixon learned that Colvin was pregnant, it was decided that Colvin was an unsuitable symbol for their cause. Soon after her arrest she was impregnated by a much older man, a moral transgression that scandalized the deeply religious black community. They felt that the white press would manipulate Colvin's "illegitimate" pregnancy as a means of undermining any boycott. Some historians have argued that civil-rights leaders, who were predominately middle class, were uneasy with Colvin's impoverished background. The NAACP had considered, but rejected, some earlier protesters deemed unable or unsuitable to withstand the pressures of cross-examination of a legal challenge to racial segregation laws. Colvin was also prone to outbursts and cursing episodes. Many of the legal charges against Colvin were dropped. A boycott and legal case never materialized from the Colvin case law.[2]
In Montgomery, Alabama, the first four rows of bus seats were reserved for white people. Buses had "colored" sections for black people—who made up more than 75% of the bus system's riders—generally in the rear of the bus; these sections were not fixed in size, but determined by the placement of a movable sign. Black people could also sit in the middle rows, until those seats were needed by white people when the white section was full. Then they had to move to seats in the rear, stand, or, if there was no room, leave the bus. Black people were not even allowed to sit across the aisle from white people. The driver could also move the "colored" section sign, or remove it altogether. Additionally, even getting on the bus presented hurdles. If white people were already sitting in the front, black people could board to pay the fare, but then they had to disembark and reenter through the rear door. There were times when the bus would depart before the black customers who had paid made it to the back entrance.
For years the black community had complained that the situation was unfair, and Parks was no exception: "My resisting being mistreated on the bus did not begin with that particular arrest . . . I did a lot of walking in Montgomery." Parks had her first run-in on the public bus on a rainy day in 1943, when the bus driver, James Blake, demanded that she get off the bus and reenter through the back door like every other black person. As she began to exit by the front door, she dropped her purse. Parks sat down for a moment in a seat for white passengers, apparently to pick up her purse. The bus driver was enraged and had barely let her step off the bus before speeding off. Rosa walked more than five miles home in the rain.
After a day at work at Montgomery Fair department store, Parks boarded the Cleveland Avenue bus at around 6 p.m., Thursday, December 1, 1955, in downtown Montgomery. She paid her fare, and sat in an empty seat in the first row of back seats reserved for black people in the "colored" section, which was near the middle of the bus, and directly behind the 10 seats reserved for white passengers. Initially, she had not noticed that the bus driver was the same man, James Blake, who had left her in the rain in 1943. As the bus traveled along its regular route, all of the "white-only" seats in the bus filled up. The bus reached the third stop in front of the Empire Theater, and several white passengers boarded. Following the standard practice of bus segregation, Blake noted that the front of the bus was filled with white passengers and there were two or three men standing, and thus moved the sign behind Parks and demanded that four black people give up their seats in the middle section so that the white passengers could sit. Years later, in recalling the events of the day, Parks said, "When that white driver stepped back toward us, when he waved his hand and ordered us up and out of our seats, I felt a determination cover my body like a quilt on a winter night."
By Parks' account, Blake said, "Y'all better make it light on yourselves and let me have those seats." [3] Three of them complied. Parks said, "The driver wanted us to stand up, the four of us. We didn't move at the beginning, but he says, 'Let me have these seats.' And the other three people moved, but I didn't." [4] The black man sitting next to her gave up his seat. Parks moved, but toward the window seat; she did not get up to move to the newly repositioned "colored" section.[5] Blake then said, "Why don't you stand up?" Parks responded, "I said I don't think I should have to stand up." Blake called the police to arrest Parks. When recalling the incident for Eyes on the Prize, a 1987 public television series on the civil rights movement, Parks said, "When he saw me still sitting, he asked if I was going to stand up, and I said, 'No, I'm not.' And he said, 'Well, if you don't stand up, I'm going to have to call the police and have you arrested.' I said, 'You may do that.'"
During a 1956 radio interview with Sydney Rogers in West Oakland several months after her 1955 arrest, Parks said when asked why she had decided not to vacate her bus seat, "I would have to know for once and for all what rights I had as a human being and a citizen of Montgomery, Alabama."
Parks also detailed her motivation in her autobiography, My Story:
When Parks refused to give up her seat, a police officer arrested her. As the officer took her away, she recalled that she asked, "Why do you push us around?" The officer's response, as she remembered it, was, "I don't know, but the law's the law, and you're under arrest." She later said, "I only knew that, as I was being arrested, that it was the very last time that I would ever ride in humiliation of this kind."
Parks was charged with a violation of Chapter 6, Section 11 segregation law of the Montgomery City code, even though she had not taken up a "white-only" seat—she was in a "colored section", but had been told to get up to allow a white man to sit. E.D. Nixon and Clifford Durr bailed Parks out of jail on the evening of December 1. Nixon then persuaded her to allow her case to be used to challenge the city's bus segregation policy. That evening, Nixon conferred with Alabama State College professor Jo Ann Robinson about using Parks' case to challenge the Montgomery City code law that allows bus segregation. Nixon also consulted black attorney Fred Gray on this same issue. Together, they agreed that a long-term legal challenge of bus segregation should be underscored by a one-day boycott of the bus system. Nixon and Robinson went about setting the boycott into motion that evening. Nixon spent the late evening talking and drawing up a list of prominent black leaders from Montgomery for support.
Four days later, Parks was tried on charges of disorderly conduct and violating a local ordinance. The trial lasted 30 minutes. Parks was found guilty and fined $10, plus $4 in court costs.[6] Parks appealed her conviction and formally challenged the legality of racial segregation. In a 1992 interview with National Public Radio's Lynn Neary, Parks recalled:
On Monday, December 5, 1955, a group of 16 to 18 people gathered at the Mt. Zion AME Zion Church to discuss boycott strategies. This group agreed that a new organization was needed to lead the boycott effort if it were to continue. Rev. Ralph Abernathy suggested the name "Montgomery Improvement Association" (MIA). The name was adopted, and the MIA was formed. Its members elected as their president a virtual newcomer to Montgomery, a young and relatively unknown minister of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
That Monday night, 50 leaders of the African American community, headed by King, gathered to discuss the proper actions to be taken in response to Parks' arrest. E.D. Nixon said, "My God, look what segregation has put in my hands!" Parks was the ideal plaintiff for a test case against city and state segregation laws. While the 15-year-old Claudette Colvin, unwed and pregnant, had been deemed unacceptable to be the center of a civil rights mobilization, King stated that, "Mrs. Parks, on the other hand, was regarded as one of the finest citizens of Montgomery—not one of the finest Negro citizens, but one of the finest citizens of Montgomery." Parks was securely married and employed, possessed a quiet demeanor, and was politically savvy. The selection of Parks for a test case supported by the NAACP may have also been in part because she was employed by the NAACP.
On Sunday, December 4, 1955, plans for the Montgomery Bus Boycott were announced at black churches in the area, and a front-page article in The Montgomery Advertiser further spread the word. At a black church rally that night, attendees unanimously agreed to continue the boycott until they were treated with the level of courtesy they expected, until black drivers were hired, and until seating in the middle of the bus was handled on a first-come basis.
The day of Parks' trial, Monday, December 5, 1955, the Women's Political Council distributed 35,000 leaflets urging black people to boycott Montgomery public buses. The handbill read, "We are . . . asking every Negro to stay off the buses Monday in protest of the arrest and trial . . . You can afford to stay out of school for one day. If you work, take a cab, or walk. But please, children and grown-ups, don't ride the bus at all on Monday. Please stay off the buses Monday."[7] It rained on that day, but the black community persevered in their boycott. Some rode in carpools, while others traveled in black cabs that charged the same fare as the bus, 10 cents. Most of the rest of the 40,000 black commuters walked, some for as far as 20 miles. The black community ended up boycotting public buses for 381 days. Dozens of public buses stood idle for months, severely damaging the bus transit company's finances, until the law requiring segregation on public buses was lifted.
Many black churches were dynamited in retaliation for the boycott. Martin Luther King's home was bombed in the early morning hours of January 30, 1956, and E.D. Nixon's home was also attacked. However, the black community's bus boycott marked one of the largest and most successful mass movements against racial segregation; it sparked many other protests, and it catapulted King to the forefront of the civil rights movement.
Through her role in initiating the boycott, Rosa Parks helped spread awareness of the civil rights struggle to many Americans. However, King wrote in his 1958 book Stride Toward Freedom that Parks' arrest was the precipitating factor, rather than the cause, of the protest: "The cause lay deep in the record of similar injustices . . . Actually, no one can understand the action of Mrs. Parks unless he realizes that eventually the cup of endurance runs over, and the human personality cries out, 'I can take it no longer.'"
Immediately after the initiation of the bus boycott, black leaders began discourse on the need for a federal lawsuit to challenge city and state bus segregation laws. About two months after the bus boycott began, Claudette Colvin's case was reconsidered by black legal leaders. Attorneys Fred Gray, E.D. Nixon and Clifford Durr (a white lawyer who, with his wife, Virginia, was an activist in the civil rights movement) searched for the ideal case law to challenge the constitutional legitimacy of city and state bus segregation laws. Parks' case was not used as the basis for the federal lawsuit because, as a criminal case, it would have had to make its way through the state criminal appeals process before a federal appeal could have been filed. City and state officials could have delayed a final rendering for years. In addition, attorney Durr believed it possible that the outcome would have merely been the vacating of Parks' conviction, with no changes in segregation laws.[8]
Gray researched for a better law suit, consulting with NAACP legal counsels Robert Carter and Thurgood Marshall (who would later become U.S. solicitor general and a U.S. Supreme Court justice). Gray approached Aurelia Browder, Susie McDonald, Claudette Colvin and Mary Louise Smith, all women who had been mistreated by the Montgomery bus system the previous year. They all agreed to become plaintiffs in a civil action law suit. On February 1, 1956, the case of Browder v. Gayle (Browder was a Montgomery housewife, Gayle the mayor of Montgomery) was filed in U.S. District Court by Fred Gray. It was Browder v. Gayle that brought to an end segregation on public buses.[9]
On June 19, 1956, the U.S. District Court three-judge panel ruled that Section 301 (31a, 31b and 31c) of Title 48, Code of Alabama, 1940, as amended, and Sections 10 and 11 of Chapter 6 of the Code of the City of Montgomery, 1952, "deny and deprive plaintiffs and other Negro citizens similarly situated of the equal protection of the laws and due process of law secured by the Fourteenth Amendment" (Browder v. Gayle, 1956). The court essentially decided that the precedent of Brown v. Board of Education (1954) could be applied to Browder v. Gayle. On November 13, 1956, the United States Supreme Court outlawed racial segregation on buses, deeming it unconstitutional. The court order arrived in Montgomery, Alabama, on December 20, 1956, and the bus boycott ended the next day. However, more violence erupted following the court order, as snipers fired into buses and into King's home, and bombs were thrown into churches and into the homes of many church ministers.[10]
After her arrest, Parks became an icon of the civil rights movement, but she suffered hardships as a result. She lost her job at the department store, and her husband quit his job after his boss forbade him from talking about his wife or the legal case. Parks traveled and spoke extensively. In 1957, Raymond and Rosa Parks left Montgomery for Hampton, Virginia—mostly because she was unable to find work, but also because of disagreements with King and other leaders of Montgomery's struggling civil rights movement. In Hampton, she found a job as a hostess in an inn at Hampton Institute. Later that year, at the urging of her younger brother Sylvester, Parks, her husband Raymond, and her mother Leona McCauley moved to Detroit, Michigan.
Parks worked as a seamstress until 1965, when U.S. Representative John Conyers (D-Michigan) hired her as a secretary and receptionist for his Congressional office in Detroit. She held this position until she retired in 1988.[10] In a telephone interview with CNN on October 24, 2005, Conyers recalled, "You treated her with deference because she was so quiet, so serene—just a very special person . . . There is only one Rosa Parks." Later in life, Parks also served as a member of the Board of Advocates of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
The Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development was co-founded in February 1987 by Rosa Parks and Elaine Eason Steele in honor of Rosa's husband Raymond Parks, who died from cancer in 1977. The institute runs the "Pathways to Freedom" bus tours, which introduce young people to important civil rights and underground railroad sites throughout the country. On a 1997 trip, the Pathways to Freedom bus drove into a river, resulting in the death of Adisa Foluke. Foluke, who was referred to as Parks' adopted grandson, had also been a chaperon on the bus. Several others were injured.
In 1992, Parks published Rosa Parks: My Story, an autobiography aimed at younger readers which details her life leading up to her decision not to give up her seat. In 1995, she published her memoirs, entitled Quiet Strength, which focuses on the role that her faith had played in her life.
On August 30, 1994, at age 81, Rosa Parks was attacked in her Detroit home by Joseph Skipper, an African American self-professed drug addict. The incident sparked outrage throughout America. After his arrest, Skipper said that he had not known he was in Parks' home, but recognized her after entering. Skipper asked, "Hey, aren't you Rosa Parks?" to which she replied, "Yes." She handed him $3 when he demanded money, and an additional $50 when he demanded more. Before fleeing, Skipper struck Parks in the face.[11] Skipper was arrested and charged with various breaking and entering offenses against Parks and other neighborhood victims. He admitted guilt and, on August 8, 1995, was sentenced to eight to fifteen years in prison.[12]
A scene in the 2002 film Barbershop, where characters discuss earlier instances of African Americans refusing to give up their bus seats, caused activists Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton to launch a boycott against the film. The scene showed a barber arguing that many other African Americans before Parks had resisted giving up their seats, and that she had received undeserved fame because of her status as an NAACP secretary.
In 1999, a lawsuit was filed on Parks' behalf against American hip-hop duo OutKast and LaFace Records, claiming that the group had illegally used Rosa Parks' name without her permission for the song "Rosa Parks", the most successful radio single of OutKast's 1998 album Aquemini. The song's chorus, which Parks' legal defense felt was disrespectful to Parks, is as follows: "Ah ha, hush that fuss / Everybody move to the back of the bus / Do you wanna bump and slump with us / We the type of people make the club get crunk."
OutKast was dismissed from the suit in August 2004. Parks' attorneys and caretaker refiled and named BMG, Arista Records and LaFace Records as the defendants, along with several parties not directly connected to the song, including Barnes & Noble and Borders Group for selling the song, and Gregory Dark and Braddon Mendelson, the director and producer, respectively, of the 1998 music video, asking for $5 billion in damages.
In September 2004, Parks hired attorney Johnnie Cochran to help her appeal the district court's decision. Cochran argued that the song did not have First Amendment protection because although its title carried Parks' name, its lyrics were not about her. However, U.S. District Judge Barbara Hackett upheld OutKast's right to use Parks' name in November 2004, and Parks took the case to the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
In October 2004, U.S. District Judge George Caram Steeh appointed Dennis Archer, a former mayor of Detroit and Michigan Supreme Court justice, as guardian of legal matters for Parks after her family expressed concerns that her caretakers and her lawyers were pursuing the case based on their own financial interest.[13] "My auntie would never, ever go to this length to hurt some young artists trying to make it in the world," Parks' niece Rhea McCauley said in an Associated Press interview. "As a family, our fear is that during her last days Auntie Rosa will be surrounded by strangers trying to make money off of her name."[14]
The lawsuit was settled on April 15, 2005. In the settlement agreement, OutKast and their producers and record labels paid Parks an undisclosed cash settlement, and agreed to work with the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development in creating educational programs on the life of Rosa Parks. The record labels and OutKast admitted to no wrongdoing. It is not known whether Parks' legal fees were paid for from her settlement money or by the record companies.[15]
Rosa Parks resided in Detroit until she died at the age of 92 on October 24, 2005, at about 19:00 hours EDT, at her apartment in a nursing home on the east side. She had been diagnosed with progressive dementia in 2004.
Parks' coffin was taken to the St. Paul African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church in Montgomery, Alabama, in a horse-drawn hearse, where she lay in repose at the altar, dressed in the uniform of a church deaconess, on Saturday, October 29. A memorial service was held there the following morning, and in the evening the casket was transported to Washington, D.C., aboard a bus similar to the one in which she made her protest, and placed in honor in the Capitol Rotunda. An estimated 50,000 people viewed the casket there, and the event was broadcast on television on October 31. This was followed by another memorial service at a different St. Paul AME church in Washington on the afternoon of Monday, October 31. From Monday to Wednesday morning, she lay in repose at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit, Michigan. The funeral was held on Wednesday, November 2, at the Greater Grace Temple Church.
The funeral was scheduled to last three hours, but it started an hour late, and because of the many speakers and the length of the speeches, it went on for seven hours, well into the night. As a result, it was televised in full by few stations outside of Detroit.
After the funeral service ended, an honor guard from the Michigan National Guard laid the U.S. flag over the casket and carried it to a horse-drawn hearse, which was intended to carry it, in daylight, to the cemetery. However, after the hearse had traveled fewer than two blocks in the dark, the casket was transferred to a motor hearse in the interest of time and safety. One reporter commented that the lights outside the nighttime motorcade made it look as if it were glowing. As the hearse passed the thousands of people who had turned out to view the procession, many clapped and released white balloons.
Rosa was interred between her husband and mother at Detroit's Woodlawn Cemetery in the chapel's mausoleum. (The chapel was renamed the Rosa L. Parks Freedom Chapel just after her death.)[16] City officials in Montgomery and Detroit announced on October 27 that the front seats of their city buses would be reserved with black ribbons in honor of Parks until her funeral. Parks had previously prepared and placed a headstone on the selected location with the inscription "Rosa L. Parks, wife, 1913–".
Parks received most of her national accolades very late in life, with relatively few awards and honors being given to her until many decades after the Montgomery Bus Boycott. In 1979, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People awarded Parks the Spingarn Medal, its highest honor, and she received the Martin Luther King Sr. Award the next year. She was inducted into the Michigan Women's Hall of Fame in 1983 for her achievements in civil rights. In 1990, she was called at the last moment to be part of the group welcoming Nelson Mandela, who had just been released from his imprisonment in South Africa. Upon spotting her in the reception line, Mandela called out her name and, hugging her, said, "You sustained me while I was in prison all those years." [17]
Parks received the Rosa Parks Peace Prize in 1994 in Stockholm, Sweden, followed by the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor given by the U.S. executive branch, in 1996. President Bill Clinton presented the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Rosa Parks on September 9, 1996. In 1998, she became the first recipient of the International Freedom Conductor Award given by the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center. The next year, Parks was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest award given by the U.S. legislative branch. She also received the Detroit-Windsor International Freedom Festival Freedom Award, and was a guest of President Bill Clinton during his 1999 State of the Union Address. Also that year, Time magazine named Parks one of the twenty most influential and iconic figures of the twentieth century.[18] In 2000, her home state awarded her the Alabama Academy of Honor, as well as the first Governor's Medal of Honor for Extraordinary Courage. She was also awarded two dozen honorary doctorates from universities worldwide, and was made an honorary member of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority.
The Rosa Parks Library and Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, was dedicated to her in November 2001. It is located on the corner where Parks boarded the famed bus. The most popular item in the museum is a sculpture of Parks sitting on a bus bench. The documentary "Mighty Times: The Legacy of Rosa Parks" received a 2002 nomination for Academy Award for Documentary Short Subject. She also collaborated that year in a TV movie of her life starring Angela Bassett.
The United States Senate passed a resolution on October 27, 2005 to honor Parks by allowing her body to lie in honor (also known as "lie in state") in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda. The House of Representatives approved the resolution on October 28. Since the founding of the practice of lying in state in the Rotunda in 1852, Parks was the 31st person, the first woman, the first American who had not been a U.S. government official, and the second non-government official (after Frenchman Pierre L'Enfant) to lie in state. She was also the second black person to lie in state, after Jacob Chestnut, one of the two United States Capitol Police officers who were fatally shot by Russell Eugene Weston Jr. on July 24, 1998. Former President Ronald Reagan had previously lain in state in the Capitol in 2004.
On October 30, President George W. Bush issued a Proclamation ordering that all flags on US public areas be flown at half staff. The proclamation stated:
Metro Transit in King County, Washington placed stickers[19] dedicating the first forward-facing seat of all its buses in Parks' memory.
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