Political Quotes

“this week our Nation lost a pioneer of the modern civil rights movement, and I rise today to honor her and pay tribute to her memory. Rosa Parks inspired generations of activists by refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus. Born Rosa McCauley on February 4, 1913, in Tuskegee, Alabama, she was the daughter of a carpenter and a teacher. She was small for her age and suffered from poor health, including chronic tonsillitis. She was very young when her parents separated, and she moved to Pine Level, Alabama, with her mother. Rosa was forced to leave school to care for her aging grandmother. She married barber Raymond Parks in 1932, at her mother's house. It was not until the year following her wedding that Ms. Parks, with the encouragement of her husband, received her high school diploma. She and her husband shared a passion for civil rights. Her husband was an early defender of the Scottsboro Boys, the group of young African Americans who were falsely accused of raping two white women in Scottsboro, Alabama. It took three attempts for Ms. Parks to register to vote in 1945. The administrator failed her the first two times she took the literacy test. The third time she took the test, she wrote all of her answers on a second piece of paper in the event she would later need to prove she should have passed. Ms. Parks was a volunteer secretary to the president of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP.…”