Rosa Parks 'made US stand up'

2005-10-25 20:53

Johannesburg - US civil rights leader Jesse Jackson has paid tribute to Rosa Parks, who refused to give up her bus seat for a white person, saying she gave strength to countrywide resistance to segregation laws in the US in 1955.

"That was an act of courage... an act of valour. She risked going to jail for a higher cause," Jackson said in Johannesburg on Tuesday.

Parks died on Monday night at the age of 92.

Jackson said that when Parks decided that she could not go to the back of the bus, as the law dictated, she set in motion a whole civil rights movement.

He said that when Parks was later asked why she did it, she said that she thought of Emmitt Till, a black teenager who was killed reportedly for flirting with a white woman during a time of heightened racial tension in Chicago in 1955, and could not "go back".

"So you thought of Steve Biko, and you could not go back," Jackson said, drawing parallels between the struggles against racial discrimination in the US and SA.

Parks' refusal to give up her seat triggered the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 and 1956 and set in motion the test case for the desegregation of public transportation, according to website Africanamericans.com.

She was arrested on December 1 1955 and after being convicted, refused to pay her fine.

Jackson said that she was not a frail old woman, as was often depicted, but an activist within the national association for the advancement of coloured people.

"When Rosa Parks sat down on that bus, she forced the rest of the US to stand up."

- SAPA