Rosa Parks: My Story: Chapters 9–12

She was honest, she was clean, she had integrity.

Mr. Nixon had decided that black ministers could do more to mobilize support in the community than anyone else.

Rufus Lewis had an exclusive nightclub—only registered voters could go there.

That’s why so many influential blacks in the South were so conservative: They had accepted favors from the white people and didn’t want to offend them.

That’s why so many influential blacks in the South were so conservative: They had accepted favors from the white people and didn’t want to offend them.

We are here this evening to say to those who have mistreated us so long that we are tired—tired of being segregated and humiliated; tired of being kicked about by the brutal feet of oppression.

The bus company people denied that the drivers were discourteous to black riders and would not hear of hiring any black drivers on the predominantly black routes.

As a dispatcher, I was responsible for taking calls from people who needed rides and then making calls to the drivers of private cars and the church station wagons to see that the people were picked up wherever they were.

The Montgomery Improvement Association held regular meetings, every Monday and Thursday night, to keep the people inspired and to talk about the latest problems and what to do about them.

He called the leaders of the boycott a bunch of Negro radicals.

We went to various meetings pertaining to our protest movement.

I was trying my best to answer this man’s questions, but evidently I wasn’t saying what he wanted me to say or something.

Someone told me that Autherine Lucy had her troubles keeping her composure when she was trying to integrate the University of Alabama. Somebody said that she broke down.

Every time they got insurance from a new company, the policy would suddenly be canceled.

Snipers fired at buses, and the city imposed curfews on the buses, not letting them run after five p.m., which meant that people who worked from nine to five couldn’t ride the buses home.

By that time the calls and the harassment had pretty much subsided, but we thought life would be better for us in Detroit.

The March planning committee didn’t want Coretta Scott King and the other wives of the male leaders to march with their husbands. Instead there was a separate procession for them.

Marian Anderson sang “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands,” and Mahalia Jackson sang “I Been ‘Buked and I Been Scorned.”

It aimed to guarantee blacks the right to vote and to use public accommodations, and provided for the federal government to prosecute those who did not obey this law.

That Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not solve all our problems. But it gave black people some protection, and some way to get redress for unfair treatment.

They herded them out of town like cattle, making them trot along the country roads and using electric cattle prods to force them to keep up the pace.

People like Dick Gregory, the comedian who was famous for going on hunger strikes to call attention to civil-rights issues and the plight of the poor, and Harry Belafonte, the singer, entertained the marchers where they camped at night.

They even had people wearing different-colored jackets to signify if they had marched all the way from Selma.

The other thing I remember about that day is that when we got to the Capitol building, there were so many hostile white people jeering and shouting at us.

I guess it was a kind of premonition, because I remember feeling that something was not right.

The concept of mass nonviolent action was something new and very controversial. Some people thought it was too risky and would invite more violence. No one had tried it before in the United States. I had read about Gandhi in India, but I had never applied his philosophy to our individual protests.

He asked for my endorsement of his candidacy, and I gave it.

It was one of the ministers who had a very great dislike for Dr. King, I think because of his popularity and how people gravitated to him.

The names of forty men and women who were killed in the civil-rights movement are etched on a circular black granite table that is in front of a curving wall.

“…until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

They call me the Mother of the Civil Rights Movement and the Patron Saint of the Civil Rights Movement.

I have more honorary degrees and plaques and awards than I can count, and I appreciate and cherish every single one of them.

Nowadays when I go into the hospital, the papers report it. They reported it when I had a pacemaker put in at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore in 1988, and when I suffered chest palpitations in February 1989 and had to be hospitalized again.

Young people can go to register to vote without being threatened and can vote without feeling apprehensive.

In recent years there has been a resurgence of reactionary attitudes. I am troubled by the recent decisions of the Supreme Court that make it harder to prove a pattern of racial discrimination in employment and by the fact that the national government does not seem very interested in pursuing violations of civil rights.