{"id":121,"date":"2016-05-21T03:33:18","date_gmt":"2016-05-21T03:33:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rosaparksbiography.org\/blog\/?p=121"},"modified":"2021-11-29T19:02:13","modified_gmt":"2021-11-29T19:02:13","slug":"conclusion-the-struggle-continues","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rosaparksbiography.org\/bio\/conclusion-the-struggle-continues\/","title":{"rendered":"Conclusion: The Struggle Continues"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Black<\/a>

Black Lives Matter.<\/strong> Flickr user 5chw4r7z<\/a>. Creative Commons<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

\n

\u201cThe Struggle Continues…The Struggle Continues…The Struggle Continues\u201d <\/em>an elderly Rosa Parks wrote over and over on a drugstore bag.<\/h3>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Too often Rosa Parks is celebrated as the \u2018quiet\u2019 and \u201caccidental\u2019 heroine of a movement long since run its course when the actual Rosa Parks thought there was much more work to be done. To the end of her life \u2014 she stood with those doing it, even as she struggled with the ways people “still only want to talk about that one evening in 1955 when I refused to give up my seat on the bus.” “I understand that I am a symbol,” she wrote in her autobiography My Story<\/em>, but she carried on her organizing nonetheless.\u00a0 “The struggle continues,” she consistently maintained.
\nAt the age of 82, Rosa Parks was mugged in her home by a young man, Joseph Skipper. Saddened by the attack, Parks refused the hysteria pundits tried to cultivate around her mugging and rejected the ways that many now saw the biggest problem facing black people as black people themselves. Rather, she prayed for Skipper and \u201cthe conditions that have made him this way.\u201d When the word went out that Parks had been mugged, Skipper was caught and beaten severely. After being convicted, he was sent to prison out of state for his own safety. Parks made it known through men in prison that she did not want the young man hurt.<\/p>\n

Long committed to cultivating youth leadership and worried that adults had become \u201ctoo complacent\u201d, she and longtime friend Elaine Steele founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development in 1987 to educate young people about African American history and the struggle for civil and human rights. Parks worried about the backsliding around key civil rights protections. She publicly opposed the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. Dismayed by the ways the Supreme Court was \u201cturning its back on the undeniable fact of discrimination and exclusion,\u201d she felt, given Thomas\u2019 poor record on civil rights and statements on Brown v Board<\/em> and Roe v Wade<\/em>, his appointment \u201cwould not represent a step forward in the road to racial progress but a u-turn on that road.\u201d Eight days after the tragedy of 9\/11, she joined with civil rights activists Harry Belafonte, Danny Glover and others in a statement against a “military response” to the attacks and calling on the United States to act “cooperatively as part of a community of nations within the framework of international law.”<\/p>\n

Similar to the ways the Black Lives Matter movement is challenging mass incarceration and police injustice, Parks had long seen the role of the law as a key site in perpetuating injustice. Long heartened by the spirit and militancy of young people, she foregrounded the responsibility of adults and movement elders to nurture the political spirit of young people and support their organizing efforts. As she reminded Spelman College students, \u201cdon\u2019t give up and don\u2019t say the movement is dead.\u201d<\/p>\n

Interview:<\/strong> Nikki Giovanni NPR interview talking about Parks, history, and her book Rosa<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cThe Struggle Continues…The Struggle Continues…The Struggle Continues\u201d an elderly Rosa Parks wrote over and over on a drugstore bag. Too often Rosa Parks is celebrated as the \u2018quiet\u2019 and \u201caccidental\u2019 heroine of a movement long since run its course when the actual Rosa Parks thought there was much more work to be done. To the… View Article<\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":585,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-121","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-conclusion","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rosaparksbiography.org\/bio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rosaparksbiography.org\/bio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rosaparksbiography.org\/bio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rosaparksbiography.org\/bio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rosaparksbiography.org\/bio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=121"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/rosaparksbiography.org\/bio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":637,"href":"https:\/\/rosaparksbiography.org\/bio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121\/revisions\/637"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rosaparksbiography.org\/bio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/585"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rosaparksbiography.org\/bio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rosaparksbiography.org\/bio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rosaparksbiography.org\/bio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}