Rosa Parks Memorial Speech
I will not stand until this country makes resistitution to a race of subordinated citizens:
Great national leaders have demanded that we stand up for our principles, that we stand by our convictions, for freedom, for equality and for justice. Ms. Rosa Parks refused this methodology. In order to challenge the racist American system of Jim Crow and segregation, she refused to stand for white ideals, notions of black inferiority, the continued sexual and physical violence perpetrated against African Americans. Echoing the collective sentiments of millions of black women and men across America’s historical time and space, Ms. Parks refused to stand.
I will not stand to let my daughter grow up feeling inferior in this country:
Words uttered by her mother, Leona McCauley when she gave birth to Rosa Parks on February 4, 1913. Plessy v. Ferguson and Jim Crow were in their second decade. Reared in Montgomery, Alabama, Mrs. McCauley made sure that her daughter would enjoy economic independence and exercise her own agency as a human being by having Rosa attend the all-Black Alabama State College to fully achieve her right as an American African-American and female citizen to gain an education .
I will not stand for the continued subjugation of African Americans, for the continued violence against African Americans, and for continued inequality against African Americans.
Words uttered when she and her husband Raymond Parks became active in the Montgomery, NAACP and again when she became the secretary in the 1950s. Together they worked on numerous cases that challenged America’s acceptance and tacit approval of beating,, murdering,, raping African Americans, and the impressment of African-Americans into economic and political slavery.
I will not stand for the continued silence on racial injustice.
Words uttered by Rosa Parks when she attended the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, a training ground for labor organizers and leaders in the struggle for justice and equality. There she trained how to fight discrimination, how to fight it through economic nationalism, by galvanizing the country in a fight for freedom, and through non-violent protests actions.
I will not stand for I am tired:
Words uttered by Rosa Parks, a seamstress, on December 1, 1955 when she refused to give up her bus seat in Montgomery, Alabama. Hers was a test case for the Supreme Court to decide once and for all whether the segregation of city buses was constitutional. Her defiance commenced the country’s largest African American act of collective resistance. The bus boycott became legendary, effecting a 42,000 strong African-American boycott of city buses. The boycott lasted 381 days and when it ended on December 21, 1956, the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled segregation on city buses unconstitutional. Its decision called into question the validity or constitutionality of Jim Crow and segregation itself. Her defiance elevated the new pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to his new position as leader of the nascent Civil Rights Movement This single defiant act by Rosa Parks propelled the modern Civil Rights Movement into America’s public vision. A mass movement of nonviolent resistance that would continue and continues to the present day. A movement that would not be silent until freedom for all African-Americans was achieved. Personally, for her defiant act, she was arrested, convicted of violating the segregation laws and fined $10 plus $4 in court costs. She lost her job.
I will not stand for the continued humiliation and victimization against African Americans .
Words uttered by Rosa Parks throughout her defiant actions. In her years of civil rights activism she risked legal sanction, she risked physical abuse and perhaps death. She clarified for a nation, both black and white that the laws of segregation, both overt and normalized brutalized African Americans and limited their chances to be agents of themselves and virtuous and productive American citizens.
I will not stand, I have been pushed too much and too far:
Words uttered by Ms. Parks throughout her years of activism after the incident on the bus. Rosa Parks was a reluctant symbol of the Civil Rights movement, she shied away from the moniker “the Mother of the Civil Rights Movement.” Quiet, soft spoken and diplomatic throughout her life, Parks understood her action as one of thousands performed by blacks and whites in order to achieve racial justice.
Her silent action refusing to give up her seat represented a symphonic shout that rang across the hearts and minds of all Americans. After the boycott in 1957 she and her husband moved to Detroit, Michigan where she served on the staff of U.S. Representative John Conyers and continued to fight for the rights of African Americans and other Americans disadvantaged by existing social, political, and economic systems. When her husband died, she founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development. The institute sponsored an annual summer program for teenagers called Pathways to Freedom. The young people tour the country in buses learning the history of their country and of the civil rights movement.
I will not stand, I will sit so that you may stand for freedom, equality, justice.
Words uttered by Rosa Parks throughout her life. Mrs.. Parks, through her numerous acts of commitment to civic equality during her life and through her legacy that will carry beyond her death challenges each and every one of us to be vigilant against racism, throw back the veil of institutionalized inequality, end brutality , end political and economic disempowerment and to no longer stand for continued hatred against people because of the color of their skin.
The commemoration of Mrs. Parks lying in honor in the capitol rotunda demands that we ask today and from this day forward: What will we not stand for ?