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The Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. connection
Ebony, Jan, 2006 by Joy Bennett Kinnon
IT was a movement that began with a single step. A single action by Rosa Parks both propelled a youthful Martin Luther King Jr. into national leadership and forever intertwined their destiny. Today, it is virtually impossible to talk about either one without referring to the other.
Rosa Parks' refusal to cede her seat to a White man on a Montgomery, Ala., bus in 1955 ignited the modern Civil Rights Movement and earned her the title, "Mother of the Civil Rights Movement." The flame she lit is still burning today. Her arrest inflamed Montgomery's Black citizens. King said then about Parks, "She was one of the finest citizens of Montgomery--not one of the finest Negro citizens but one of the finest citizens of Montgomery." In his 1958 book, Stride Toward Freedom, Dr. King wrote that Mrs. Parks' arrest was "the precipitating factor" in the Montgomery Bus Boycott that lasted 381 days. King, then only 26 years old and a new pastor, was elected president of the boycott organization, and during the boycott, many churches and homes, including his own, were bombed.
Today, both Parks and King are world-famous symbols of the American Civil Rights Movement, whose influence has helped ignite other freedom movements around the world.
COPYRIGHT 2006 Johnson Publishing Co.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
