Rosa Parks

Her feet - tiny feet that changed the world - peeked first from the back seat of a white Cadillac limousine yesterday, small black boots dangling, the feet of an old woman searching for footing on a cityscape of melting snow. Instantly, four sets of hands brought her safely to ground in Philadelphia, and a cry swept across Independence Mall, "She's here!" They had delayed the start of the national holiday celebrating the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday for her; they had held up the ringing of Centennial Bell in Independence Hall for her. They had stalled the Philadelphia bell-ringing ordered by King's widow, Coretta Scott King - the bell-ringing that would set Atlanta church bells, Big Ben in London and bells worldwide tolling for freedom.

I'VE READ many of the tributes to Rosa Parks, and she has been rightly called a legend. But as we bury Rosa Parks the person, I think it's time we bury the still-lingering myth of Rosa Parks - that she was just a seamstress whose feet hurt, too tired to move after a long day of work, whose moment of stubborn courage was the accidental spark that started the civil rights movement. In fact, as we have started to learn from some of her obituaries, Rosa Parks was a committed activist, a longtime member of the NAACP.

Rosa Parks, the 83-year-old civil rights icon, could have been anyone's favorite grandmother yesterday at an event in her honor at Philadelphia Community College. The ever-smiling, soft-spoken, Parks, who appeared before 400 young people, is the same woman who 40 years ago summoned the courage and strength to stand up to the racist, segregated policies and practices of the South while on a bus in Montgomery, Ala. Her refusal to give her seat to a white man sparked the 381-day Montgomery bus boycott.

Rosa Parks, the woman whose refusal to submit to segregated public transit in Montgomery, Ala., in 1955 helped spark the civil rights movement, has been named the first recipient of the International Freedom Conductor Award presented by The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati. The award to Parks, 85, who lives in Detroit, is to be presented at a black-tie dinner on Sept. 26 at the Westin Hotel in downtown Cincinnati. The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, scheduled to open in 2003, is to be a national education center and museum commemorating the work and the people associated with the clandestine networks that helped blacks escape slavery in the years prior to the Civil War. The museum, or Freedom Center as it is to be known, will be located on the Ohio River, which, like the Philadelphia area, played an important role in the movement of people from South to North, from slave states to freedom.

Rosa Parks says she never intended to launch the civil-rights movement with her quiet refusal to sit in the back of a bus in Montgomery, Ala., in 1955. "When I got on the bus, I only wanted to come home," she said Saturday night during a news conference in Topeka, Kan. "I just knew that as far as I was concerned, I would never ride on a segregated bus again. " Now 76, Parks was the guest of honor at a reception marking the 35th anniversary of the landmark civil-rights case Brown v . Board of Education, which struck down the concept of separate-but-equal and invalidated laws allowing segregated schools.

AS MANY will mourn the loss of Rosa Parks, we should also mourn the loss of our society's integrity. Rosa Parks had the strength, courage and wisdom to stand up for what she believed was right for her and society. Her determination has been admired and mocked since her historical seating on Dec. 1, 1955. Her choice wasn't given to her - it was her choice to make a change. Yet in the technological age we in society fail to stand up for what we believe is fair and humanitarian. So easy to turn a blind eye while a child is abused, a person mistreated, our elders neglected, millions are homeless.

It's not that the legal issues aren't compelling. Indeed, for us journalist types, there are few things sexier than a First Amendment lawsuit. But where Rosa Parks v. OutKast is concerned, what scrapes at your heart is something beyond the law. For all that the suit may say about freedom of speech, it says more about the disconnect between African American generations, the wrenching sense that an inheritance of pride and purpose was never passed...

In recognition of Black History Month, the West Chester Area School District has invited three civil rights leaders to speak to students and the public about their experiences. On Feb. 26, the district will be visited by Martin Luther King 3d, son of the Rev. Dr. Martin King Jr.; Rosa Parks of Montgomery, Ala., who became famous when she refused to sit in the back of a segregated bus, and Fred D. Gray, the civil rights lawyer who represented Parks and challenged Alabama Gov. George Wallace's attempt to block the desegregation of the University of Alabama.

When civil rights legend Rosa Parks refused to move to the rear of a Montgomery, Ala., bus in 1955, she had no way of knowing she would become a symbol of one of the century's greatest struggles against social injustice. Nor could she have foreseen how little things would have changed by 1992. Appearing at Lincoln University in Chester County yesterday, Parks said the Rodney King verdict and its aftermath were a "great setback" for the cause of racial justice. But she said she hoped that somehow, positive steps would result from the unrest.

The white man who boarded that city bus in Montgomery, Ala., on Dec. 1, 1955, did what was accepted in those days. He stood by and waited for the bus driver to shoo "Negro" passengers out of their seats near the front so that he, a white, could sit. He stood by and waited for legalized discrimination to work in his favor. But this time, the bias endorsed by the white man didn't work for him. This time, there was a black woman named Rosa Parks sitting in that seat. She was 42 and, in a sense, she had been waiting all her life for this nondescript white passenger.

To mark Monday's commemoration of the birth of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., match the event of the civil rights era with the year it occurred. Answers: D3. 1. Congress passes the Civil Rights Act. 2. Congress passes the Voting Rights Act. 3. Freedom Rides begin from Washington into Southern states. 4. The Poor People's March on Washington. 5. President Dwight Eisenhower sends troops to Little Rock, Ark., to ensure nine black students are admitted to the high school.

A new study by a prominent antidiscrimination group gives 35 states, including Pennsylvania and New Jersey, failing grades when it comes to teaching students about the civil rights movement. Officials of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which released the study, also found that Pennsylvania was among 16 states that did not require that the history of the movement be taught in public school. "An educated populace must be taught basics about American history," civil rights activist and former center president Julian Bond wrote in the report's foreword.

Enoch D. Houser, 82, a veteran of the Montgomery, Ala. bus boycott who retired in 1994 as a professor of biology at Lincoln University, died of congestive heart failure Thursday, June 23, at the LifeCare center at Chester County Hospital. Born in Autaugaville, Ala., Dr. Houser graduated cum laude from Alabama State University in 1951. He enlisted in the Air Force and after being commissioned, his wife, Janice, wrote in biographical notes, he "became one of the first and few African American jet pilots in the newly integrated" service and "flew night fighters" over Japan and Korea.

By Mai Yamani The unexpected visibility and assertiveness of women has helped propel what has become known as the Arab spring. Major changes have occurred in the minds and lives of women, helping them break the shackles of the past and demand their freedom and dignity. Since January 2011, images of millions of women demonstrating alongside men have been beamed around the world. One saw women from all walks of life marching for a better future for themselves and their countries.

NEW YORK - Manning Marable, 60, an influential historian whose forthcoming Malcolm X biography could revise perceptions of the slain civil rights leader, died Friday, just days before the book described as his life's work was to be released. His wife, Leith Mullings, said that Dr. Marable died from complications of pneumonia at New York-Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan. She said he had suffered for 24 years from sarcoidosis, an inflammatory lung disease, and had undergone a double lung transplant in July.

You would certainly expect black and white women to shop at the same stores, luxuriate in the same spas, even frequent the same makeup counters. And more than five decades after Rosa Parks held on to her bus seat, they do. But there was one beauty barrier that was never breached: hair salons. All things being equal, women's hair was not. Because no one, according to the conventional wisdom, could style a black woman's hair except another African American, salons were the only institutions more segregated than church on Sunday mornings.

AS A civil-rights activist, Rochelle E. Scott got to know many of the legends of that movement, including a young Martin Luther King Jr. when he was a student at the former Crozer Theological Seminary, in Chester. She was among those who threw a dinner for Rosa Parks, whose arrest in 1955 after refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger on a bus in Montgomery, Ala., helped launch the civil-rights movement in the South. In Philadelphia, Rochelle worked with the Rev. William H. Gray III, pastor of her church, Bright Hope Baptist, and the Rev. Paul Washington, of the Church of the Advocate, and others who were fighting for racial justice.

A few words about who "we" is. "This is a moment," said Glenn Beck three months ago on his radio program, "... that I think we 'reclaim' the civil rights movement. It has been so distorted and so turned upside down. ... We are on the right side of history. We are on the side of individual freedoms and liberties and damn it, we will reclaim the civil rights moment. We will take that movement, because we were the people that did it in the first place!" Beck was promoting his "Restoring Honor" rally, held this weekend at the Lincoln Memorial, 47 years to the day after the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. famously spoke there.

The sound of a train rumbling in the distance has always been soothing to me, the plaintive wail of its horn a reminder of my childhood. I heard that sound often as a little boy, at all times of the day and into the night, whenever an occasional train passed near my home. My brothers and I would sometimes stop playing to count the cars of a rail caravan. At night in bed, if I heard a train, I wondered where it was going and whether one day I, too, would travel far from home. The sound of a passing train pushed me into reverie a week ago while I was in Montgomery, Ala., for an observance of the 50th anniversary of the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird . The novel won a Pulitzer Prize for its author, Harper Lee. But the reclusive octogenarian, who lives in Monroeville, Ala., didn't make our party.

PERFORMING AT an Army base in 1945, Lena Horne was shocked by what she saw: White German POWs sitting in the front rows while black American soldiers were forced to sit at the rear. White soldiers had enjoyed a performance by Horne the night before in a comfortable auditorium. Now here were the black soldiers, jammed into a base kitchen, defenders of the state seated behind their enemies. Horne walked past the Germans, put her back to them, and began singing to the African-Americans, according to her 1965 autobiography, Lena.