Rosa Parks is the "Matriarch of the Civil Rights Movement". Her refusal to give up her bus seat to a white man changed the course of American society and started the modern civil rights. In 1955, Blacks suffered under oppressive Jim Crow laws that required separation of races in buses, restaurants and public accommodations throughout the South, while legally sanctioned racial discrimination kept blacks out of many jobs and neighborhoods in the North.
Her arrest triggered a 381-day boycott of the bus system organized by a then little-known 26 year old Baptist minister, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who later earned the Nobel Peace Prize for his work. The Montgomery bus boycott, which came one year after the Supreme Court’s landmark declaration that separate schools for blacks and whites were “inherently unequal,” marked the start of the modern civil rights movement. The movement culminated in the 1964 federal Civil Rights Act, which banned racial discrimination in public accommodations.
For more info on Rosa Parks, click MSN NBC.
2 comments:
Need an incentive to change the world? The current Nobel Peace Prize winner is given 10,000,000 Swedish kronor, which I hear is around a million dollars. No wonder all those beauty pageant contestants want world peace! (I want castration for all violent criminals, even just the ones that go around hitting people on the head with metal poles, our current system sucks.)
As of today, 10,000,000 SEK is worth 1,271,455 USD. The prize is announced each October, congratulations to these Americans:
Physics--Roy J. Glauber (Harvard) John L. Hall (Univ of Colorado)
Chemistry--Robert H. Grubbs (Caltech) and Richard R. Schrock (MIT)
Economics--Thomas C. Schelling (Univ of MD)
So if you know any of them, it might be a good time to remind them of how "valuable" your friendship is!
__Annabel Philipines
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