(Chicago Sun-Times) America must honor and celebrate the life and legacy of Rosa Parks. Both Republicans and Democrats should support H.R. 4145, sponsored by U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.) and nearly 100 co-sponsors, which aims to erect a life-size statue of Parks in the Capitol’s National Statuary H a ll.
Parks is commonly referred to as the ”mother of the civil rights movement,” not simply because she refused to sit at the back of the bus, but for courageously challenging apartheid in America and inspiring the grass-roots bus boycott in Montgomery, Ala., which produced one of America’s most revered sons, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and the civil rights movement that dismantled legal segregation.
Parks and other activists were avid believers in the principle of ”equal protection under the law,” confirmed in the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Brown vs. Board of Education decision in 1954, and together they sparked a movement that led to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the 1968 Open Housing Act, signaling the defeat of American apartheid.
Parks is the foremost American symbol identified with forcing America to confront its bigoted legacy of white supremacy, typified by slavery and segregation. She and others forced America to mature as a nation and evolve its moral fabric and sociopolitical landscape to permit all Americans to realize the fundamental freedoms of equality and justice enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.
Americans have traditionally memorialized their great leaders by naming holidays after them and erecting monuments and libraries in their honor. Yet, the King bust in the rotunda is the only ”monument” honoring an African American on Capitol Hill. There is not a life-size monument honoring an African American in the rotunda. Go figure!
Black women have made an immeasurable and thankless contribution to every facet of human existence in America and beyond. From civil, political and human rights advocacy to innovations in business, science, arts and culture, African-American women have led America. Yet, America has unabashedly and unapologetically raped, beaten, disenfranchised and generally exploited black women while schizophrenically trusting them to serve as nanny to its children and keep house. After 400 years of sacrifice and struggle, America has failed to erect a monument of a single noted black woman patriot and leader.
Conversely, Capitol Hill is fraught with monuments that honor America’s greatest slavers, confederates and alleged racists, including Gen. Joseph Wheeler; Jefferson Davis; Brigham Young; Henry Clay, and Gen. Robert E. Lee. Would it not signal our maturity as a nation if a life-size monument of Rosa Parks, a small, meek and humble woman who helped transform American society armed only with the awesome weapons of love, courage and hope, stood beside these ”great men”? The bill calling for a statue of Parks is sitting idle in the House Administration Committee chaired by Republican Bob Ney of Ohio. Only eight of the 100 co-sponsors of the bill are Republicans. What happened to the Republican Party that was instrumental in passing the 1964 Civil Rights Act; 1965 Voting Rights Act; the 1968 Open Housing Act, and the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery in 1865? It was the gains during Reconstruction that laid the groundwork for the second ”Reconstruction” in the 1960s that allowed Parks to make history.
