Drafter
Clerk 10/26/2005
Title
A MOTION honoring Rosa Parks and dedicating the front seat of Metro Transit buses to the memory of Ms. Parks and her courageous actions that sparked a defining struggle in the civil rights movement in the United States of America.
Body
WHEREAS, on December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, an African-American seamstress in Montgomery, Alabama, refused to give up her bus seat for a white man and was subsequently arrested and fined, and
WHEREAS, at the age of forty-two, Ms. Parks showed undaunted courage in taking a great personal risk in refusing to follow the unjust rules of racial segregation, which many others died defying, and
WHEREAS, Ms. Parks's courageous actions touched off a three-hundred-eighty-one-day bus boycott in which approximately forty thousand people participated, some walking many miles until the demands of African-American Montgomery bus riders were met so that they would be treated respectfully, black bus drivers would be hired and segregation on buses ended, and
WHEREAS, on December 20, 1956, by order of the Supreme Court, segregation on buses was outlawed, the boycott ended, but violent civil unrest ensued, endangering the lives of many African-Americans as they continued to fight for equality, and
WHEREAS, Ms. Parks's refusal to give up her seat focused national and international attention on the cruelties and injustices of racial segregation and inspired many, including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to act, and set into motion the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, and continues to inspire those seeking equality and justice in our nation and beyond, and
WHEREAS, Ms. Parks was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Congressional Gold Medal and the American Public Transportation Association's Lifetime Achievement Award, among many other honors, and
WHEREAS, in 1986, the metropolitan King County council voted to rename the county in honor of civil rights leader and Nobel Peace Prize winn...

Click here for full text