STEPPING STONES 09/03/17 By DAMALI VILLAGE Rehabilitative Community "Your peace of mind is our business"

Volume 3, Issue 36, September 3, 2017

In this issue...

Public Service Announcements

Quote Of The Week: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Book Of The Month: “Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present” By Harriet A. Washington

It’s YOUR Health: Hatred

Historical Fact Of The Week: History Of African Americans Part XII

Editorial Commentary: Coming!        

 

Public Service Announcements

• The rechartering for The Head Cornerstone Corporation in the State Of Delaware as well as all updated business licenses and associated issues are forth coming pending litigation. Thank you.
• Visit WWW.Ready.gov at your earliest convenience so that you may be informed of basic protective measures before, during, and after disasters/emergencies, learn disaster prepared activities, training, plans, and what shelters are in or near your community, develop an emergency plan for yourself and your family in the event of an actual disaster/emergency, build an disaster/emergency supply kit including a basic emergency medical/trauma bag in case of an event, and GET INVOLVED!
• Get your CPR (Cardio-Pulomonary Resuscitation) and Basic First Aid/First Responder/Basic Life Support including child birth and Emergency Pediatric Care training today. Check with the American Heart Association at WWW.Heart.org for locations. It may just save a life.
•  It’s a lot of fun and excitement, it’s healthy, it’s a great family activity, and it’s very practical. Find a course in self-defense for you and your loved ones and learn to protect yourselves. You just never know.
•  We have the constitutional right to BEAR ARMS and many states have the CCW (Conceal Carry Weapon) License for when you and your loved ones are outside of your home environment. Search the web for free information concerning the Conceal Carry Laws as well as other valuable information. Get the CCW License today (where applicable) for you and your family members of age and LEARN HOW TO SHOOT. You’ll feel better that you did.
•  WATER; it’s very essential for normal body functions and not only carries nutrients to your cells, but flushes out the toxins in are bodies that lead to diseases such as cancers, diabetes, and heart diseases. According to the Mayo Clinic and the Institute of Health, water consumption varies for each person depending on many factors associated with life styles, such as current health, activities, and where you live. Be informed about what your daily intake should be and “drink up”. It will make YOUR world a better place.

Public Service Announcements

are brought to you by

Within our African American communities, there is a DISEASE; drug gangs as well as other organized criminal organizations. Before and after any conversation and until we remove the disease…

“…we will continue to SUFFER from exceptionally HIGH crime rates (burglaries, extortion, racketeering, money laundering, prostitution/teen prostitution, illegal weapons, auto thefts, etc.), INCREASED violent crimes (murders, assaults, rapes, kidnappings, robberies, gang rapes, child molestations, child endangerment/abuse, etc.), DECREASED land values, decreased BUSINESS INVESTMENTS AND DEVELOPMENT, DECREASED employment opportunities in affected areas, and a “WAR ZONE” environment in which our CHILDREN and elders are FORCED to survive in. A RECLASSIFICATION of these crimes and ALL involved in their OFFENSES to include all persons assisting in any CAPACITY as terrorists will, also, REMOVE many, but NOT all, of the OBSTRUCTIONS for our children as they LEARN, play, and grow during their crucial DEVELOPMENTAL YEARS by significantly REDUCING the VIOLENT CRIMES, eliminating FORCED gang membership, SIGNIFICANTLY reducing teen pregnancy, TEEN drug use, teen dropout rates, SCHOOL ABSENTEISM, illiteracy rates, TEEN SUICIDE RATES, as well as the eradicating of the PSYCHOLOGICAL TRAUMA as well as mental anguish that is PRODUCED by the “war zone” environment. The BY-PRODUCTS of this campaign include, but are not limited to significant REDUCTION in Medical budget expenditures CAUSED by drug related medical and traumatic CONDITIONS (DRUG OVERDOSES, HOMICIDES, SUICIDES, DRUG INFLUENCED/RELATED AUTO ACCIDENTS, DRUG INDUCED PSYCHOLOGICAL PATIENTS, BABIES BORN WITH DRUG ADDICTIONS, THE SPREAD OF SEXUALLY TRANSMITTED DISEASES, BABIES BORN WITH SEXUALLY TRANSMITTED DISEASES, TRAUMA RELATED TO DRUGS/GANGS AND VIOLENT CRIME, ETC.).”

(Excerpt from Quote Of The Week 01/01/12)

And our babies will continue to be oppressed until death and all day before they can live. This is not LOVE. This is HATE. Please, STOP!

Brought to you

By

The “From the dirt…” Community Redevelopment Project

A program of

COMMUNITY INTERNATIONAL

 

Tending The Garden; Plucking Poverty By The Roots

By Akil A. Bomani

The most severe form of poverty is ignorance; lack of knowledge or factual, true, and always objective information (as opposed to misinformation or ill knowledge). Only when we breathe, speak, and teach true knowledge to ourselves, each other, and especially to our youth will we begin the work of eradicating the overwhelming abundance of poverty from our minds, our bodies, and most importantly, our spirits; and thus, the world. This alone will heal all plagues, address every societal need, and end suffering the world over and forever. And what is knowledge without wisdom? Just look around you at our world today. Lack of wisdom is the second most severe form of poverty afflicting “Man”. Without wisdom, knowledge is just a loaded gun or an explosive device in the wrong hands. It is the obvious cure for the disease. And then, what will we do with ourselves?

Pedophiliac: The Grip Of Reality Reveals The One And Only Solution 

By Akil A. Bomani

Pedophiliac, Child molester, Child predator, Child sex slaver/trafficker, … In summarizing this…“issue”, what a complete contradiction of nature and even evolution; an abomination. And what an example to the youth of the world we have set in not only not putting an end to such atrocity everywhere it exists, but have allowed it to now be an accepted part of popular culture in some of our societies, continue in others as “tradition”, or incidents and perpetrators have become so common place that one can see them “coming out of the closet”. The damage they inflict on their victims, their victims’ family, friends, school mates, care providers, emergency response personnel, etc. go far beyond bad dreams. Our current problem is this; the DISEASE is spiritual and mental which leads to the actual physical act and crime and THERE IS NO CURE. And so, there is but ONE solution. No matter where you are, no matter your socio-politico, cultural, and/or economic back ground, only those with no reasoning will disagree. And so, no matter where you are…no matter what country, city, township, or village, ethnic group, cultural orientation, or other group, support the enacting and, most importantly, enforcement of internationally standardized laws that reflect and directly address this most serious matter. Until there is a cure, our children are not safe. Seek to initiate the passing of laws that PERMANENTLY remove offenders from society by penalties of either LIFE OF IMPRISONMENT/MENTAL INSTITUTION with NO CHANCE OF PAROLE or RELEASE until a cure is discovered or DEATH BY SOME LETHAL MECHANISM for all perpetrators of this most heinous assault on our youth. We must, also, in a formal setting, teach our youth from the early developmental stages “sex education”, the very best parenting practices among other essential “life skills”, and the need, how, and why to report offenders to assist with their protection and bringing perpetrators to justice. And we must, in a formal setting, teach current parents, educators, as well as all other care providers how to recognize a problem when they encounter it. Please, join this War on Pedophiliacs as we seek all progressive methods to “end this right now”. Why? Pedophiliacs CAN’T help themselves and the next child could be yours. Or how else will our children ever respect us again?

 

Brought to you by

 

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

“First, we are challenged to develop a world perspective. No individual can live alone, no nation can live alone, and anyone who feels that he can live alone is sleeping through a revolution. The world in which we live is geographically one. The challenge that we face today is to make it one in terms of brotherhood.

Now it is true that the geographical oneness of this age has come into being to a large extent through modern man’s scientific ingenuity. Modern man through his scientific genius has been able to dwarf distance and place time in chains. And our jet planes have compressed into minutes distances that once took weeks and even months. All of this tells us that our world is a neighborhood.

Through our scientific and technological genius, we have made of this world a neighborhood and yet we have not had the ethical commitment to make of it a brotherhood. But somehow, and in some way, we have got to do this. We must all learn to live together as brothers or we will all perish together as fools. We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the way God’s universe is made; this is the way it is structured.

John Donne caught it years ago and placed it in graphic terms: "No man is an island entire of itself. Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main." And he goes on toward the end to say, "Any man’s death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind; therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." We must see this, believe this, and live by it if we are to remain awake through a great revolution.

Secondly, we are challenged to eradicate the last vestiges of racial injustice from our nation. I must say this morning that racial injustice is still the black man’s burden and the white man’s shame.

It is an unhappy truth that racism is a way of life for the vast majority of white Americans, spoken and unspoken, acknowledged and denied, subtle and sometimes not so subtle—the disease of racism permeates and poisons a whole body politic. And I can see nothing more urgent than for America to work passionately and unrelentingly—to get rid of the disease of racism.

Something positive must be done. Everyone must share in the guilt as individuals and as institutions. The government must certainly share the guilt; individuals must share the guilt; even the church must share the guilt.

We must face the sad fact that at eleven o’clock on Sunday morning when we stand to sing "In Christ there is no East or West," we stand in the most segregated hour of America.

The hour has come for everybody, for all institutions of the public sector and the private sector to work to get rid of racism. And now if we are to do it we must honestly admit certain things and get rid of certain myths that have constantly been disseminated all over our nation.

One is the myth of time. It is the notion that only time can solve the problem of racial injustice. And there are those who often sincerely say to the Negro and his allies in the white community, "Why don’t you slow up? Stop pushing things so fast. Only time can solve the problem. And if you will just be nice and patient and continue to pray, in a hundred or two hundred years the problem will work itself out."

There is an answer to that myth. It is that time is neutral. It can be used wither constructively or destructively. And I am sorry to say this morning that I am absolutely convinced that the forces of ill will in our nation, the extreme rightists of our nation—the people on the wrong side—have used time much more effectively than the forces of goodwill. And it may well be that we will have to repent in this generation. Not merely for the vitriolic words and the violent actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence and indifference of the good people who sit around and say, "Wait on time."

Somewhere we must come to see that human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals who are willing to be co-workers with God. And without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the primitive forces of social stagnation. So we must help time and realize that the time is always ripe to do right.

Now there is another myth that still gets around: it is a kind of over reliance on the bootstrap philosophy. There are those who still feel that if the Negro is to rise out of poverty, if the Negro is to rise out of the slum conditions, if he is to rise out of discrimination and segregation, he must do it all by himself. And so they say the Negro must lift himself by his own bootstraps.

They never stop to realize that no other ethnic group has been a slave on American soil. The people who say this never stop to realize that the nation made the black man’s color a stigma. But beyond this they never stop to realize the debt that they owe a people who were kept in slavery two hundred and forty-four years.

In 1863 the Negro was told that he was free as a result of the Emancipation Proclamation being signed by Abraham Lincoln. But he was not given any land to make that freedom meaningful. It was something like keeping a person in prison for a number of years and suddenly discovering that that person is not guilty of the crime for which he was convicted. And you just go up to him and say, "Now you are free," but you don’t give him any bus fare to get to town. You don’t give him any money to get some clothes to put on his back or to get on his feet again in life.

Every court of jurisprudence would rise up against this, and yet this is the very thing that our nation did to the black man. It simply said, "You’re free," and it left him there penniless, illiterate, not knowing what to do. And the irony of it all is that at the same time the nation failed to do anything for the black man, though an act of Congress was giving away millions of acres of land in the West and the Midwest. Which meant that it was willing to undergird its white peasants from Europe with an economic floor.

But not only did it give the land, it built land-grant colleges to teach them how to farm. Not only that, it provided county agents to further their expertise in farming; not only that, as the years unfolded it provided low interest rates so that they could mechanize their farms. And to this day thousands of these very persons are receiving millions of dollars in federal subsidies every years not to farm. And these are so often the very people who tell Negroes that they must lift themselves by their own bootstraps. It’s all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.

We must come to see that the roots of racism are very deep in our country, and there must be something positive and massive in order to get rid of all the effects of racism and the tragedies of racial injustice.

There is another thing closely related to racism that I would like to mention as another challenge. We are challenged to rid our nation and the world of poverty. Like a monstrous octopus, poverty spreads its nagging, prehensile tentacles into hamlets and villages all over our world. Two-thirds of the people of the world go to bed hungry tonight. They are ill-housed; they are ill-nourished; they are shabbily clad. I’ve seen it in Latin America; I’ve seen it in Africa; I’ve seen this poverty in Asia.

I remember some years ago Mrs. King and I journeyed to that great country known as India. And I never will forget the experience. It was a marvelous experience to meet and talk with the great leaders of India, to meet and talk with and to speak to thousands and thousands of people all over that vast country. These experiences will remain dear to me as long as the cords of memory shall lengthen.

But I say to you this morning, my friends, there were those depressing moments. How can one avoid being depressed when he sees with his own eyes evidences of millions of people going to bed hungry at night? How can one avoid being depressed when he sees with his own eyes God’s children sleeping on the sidewalks at night? In Bombay more than a million people sleep on the sidewalks every night. In Calcutta more than six hundred thousand sleep on the sidewalks every night. They have no beds to sleep in; they have no houses to go in. How can one avoid being depressed when he discovers that out of India’s population of more than five hundred million people, some four hundred and eighty million make an annual income of less than ninety dollars a year. And most of them have never seen a doctor or a dentist.

As I noticed these things, something within me cried out, "Can we in America stand idly by and not be concerned?" And an answer came: "Oh no!" Because the destiny of the United States is tied up with the destiny of India and every other nation. And I started thinking of the fact that we spend in America millions of dollars a day to store surplus food, and I said to myself, "I know where we can store that food free of charge—in the wrinkled stomachs of millions of God’s children all over the world who go to bed hungry at night." And maybe we spend far too much of our national budget establishing military bases around the world rather than bases of genuine concern and understanding.

Not only do we see poverty abroad, I would remind you that in our own nation there are about forty million people who are poverty-stricken. I have seen them here and there. I have seen them in the ghettos of the North; I have seen them in the rural areas of the South; I have seen them in Appalachia. I have just been in the process of touring many areas of our country and I must confess that in some situations I have literally found myself crying.

I was in Marks, Mississippi, the other day, which is in Whitman County, the poorest county in the United States. I tell you, I saw hundreds of little black boys and black girls walking the streets with no shoes to wear. I saw their mothers and fathers trying to carry on a little Head Start program, but they had no money. The federal government hadn’t funded them, but they were trying to carry on. They raised a little money here and there; trying to get a little food to feed the children; trying to teach them a little something.

And I saw mothers and fathers who said to me not only were they unemployed, they didn’t get any kind of income—no old-age pension, no welfare check, no anything. I said, "How do you live?" And they say, "Well, we go around, go around to the neighbors and ask them for a little something. When the berry season comes, we pick berries. When the rabbit season comes, we hunt and catch a few rabbits. And that’s about it."

And I was in Newark and Harlem just this week. And I walked into the homes of welfare mothers. I saw them in conditions—no, not with wall-to-wall carpet, but wall-to-wall rats and roaches. I stood in an apartment and this welfare mother said to me, "The landlord will not repair this place. I’ve been here two years and he hasn’t made a single repair." She pointed out the walls with all the ceiling falling through. She showed me the holes where the rats came in. She said night after night we have to stay awake to keep the rats and roaches from getting to the children. I said, "How much do you pay for this apartment?" She said, "a hundred and twenty-five dollars." I looked, and I thought, and said to myself, "It isn’t worth sixty dollars." Poor people are forced to pay more for less. Living in conditions day in and day out where the whole area is constantly drained without being replenished. It becomes a kind of domestic colony. And the tragedy is, so often these forty million people are invisible because America is so affluent, so rich. Because our expressways carry us from the ghetto, we don’t see the poor.

Jesus told a parable one day, and he reminded us that a man went to hell because he didn’t see the poor. His name was Dives. He was a rich man. And there was a man by the name of Lazarus who was a poor man, but not only was he poor, he was sick. Sores were all over his body, and he was so weak that he could hardly move. But he managed to get to the gate of Dives every day, wanting just to have the crumbs that would fall from his table. And Dives did nothing about it. And the parable ends saying, "Dives went to hell, and there were a fixed gulf now between Lazarus and Dives."

There is nothing in that parable that said Dives went to hell because he was rich. Jesus never made a universal indictment against all wealth. It is true that one day a rich young ruler came to him, and he advised him to sell all, but in that instance Jesus was prescribing individual surgery and not setting forth a universal diagnosis. And if you will look at that parable with all of its symbolism, you will remember that a conversation took place between heaven and hell, and on the other end of that long-distance call between heaven and hell was Abraham in heaven talking to Dives in hell.

Now Abraham was a very rich man. If you go back to the Old Testament, you see that he was the richest man of his day, so it was not a rich man in hell talking with a poor man in heaven; it was a little millionaire in hell talking with a multimillionaire in heaven. Dives didn’t go to hell because he was rich; Dives didn’t realize that his wealth was his opportunity. It was his opportunity to bridge the gulf that separated him from his brother Lazarus. Dives went to hell because he was passed by Lazarus every day and he never really saw him. He went to hell because he allowed his brother to become invisible. Dives went to hell because he maximized the minimum and minimized the maximum. Indeed, Dives went to hell because he sought to be a conscientious objector in the war against poverty.

And this can happen to America, the richest nation in the world—and nothing’s wrong with that—this is America’s opportunity to help bridge the gulf between the haves and the have-nots. The question is whether America will do it. There is nothing new about poverty. What is new is that we now have the techniques and the resources to get rid of poverty. The real question is whether we have the will.

In a few weeks some of us are coming to Washington to see if the will is still alive or if it is alive in this nation. We are coming to Washington in a Poor People’s Campaign. Yes, we are going to bring the tired, the poor, the huddled masses. We are going to bring those who have known long years of hurt and neglect. We are going to bring those who have come to feel that life is a long and desolate corridor with no exit signs. We are going to bring children and adults and old people, people who have never seen a doctor or a dentist in their lives.

We are not coming to engage in any histrionic gesture. We are not coming to tear up Washington. We are coming to demand that the government address itself to the problem of poverty. We read one day, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." But if a man doesn’t have a job or an income, he has neither life nor liberty nor the possibility for the pursuit of happiness. He merely exists.

We are coming to ask America to be true to the huge promissory note that it signed years ago. And we are coming to engage in dramatic nonviolent action, to call attention to the gulf between promise and fulfillment; to make the invisible visible.

Why do we do it this way? We do it this way because it is our experience that the nation doesn’t move around questions of genuine equality for the poor and for black people until it is confronted massively, dramatically in terms of direct action.

Great documents are here to tell us something should be done. We met here some years ago in the White House conference on civil rights. And we came out with the same recommendations that we will be demanding in our campaign here, but nothing has been done. The President’s commission on technology, automation and economic progress recommended these things some time ago. Nothing has been done. Even the urban coalition of mayors of most of the cities of our country and the leading businessmen have said these things should be done. Nothing has been done. The Kerner Commission came out with its report just a few days ago and then made specific recommendations. Nothing has been done.

And I submit that nothing will be done until people of goodwill put their bodies and their souls in motion. And it will be the kind of soul force brought into being as a result of this confrontation that I believe will make the difference.

Yes, it will be a Poor People’s Campaign. This is the question facing America. Ultimately a great nation is a compassionate nation. America has not met its obligations and its responsibilities to the poor.

One day we will have to stand before the God of history and we will talk in terms of things we’ve done. Yes, we will be able to say we built gargantuan bridges to span the seas, we built gigantic buildings to kiss the skies. Yes, we made our submarines to penetrate oceanic depths. We brought into being many other things with our scientific and technological power.

It seems that I can hear the God of history saying, "That was not enough! But I was hungry, and ye fed me not. I was naked, and ye clothed me not. I was devoid of a decent sanitary house to live in, and ye provided no shelter for me. And consequently, you cannot enter the kingdom of greatness. If ye do it unto the least of these, my brethren, ye do it unto me." That’s the question facing America today.”

(“Remaining Awake through A Great Revolution”)

Delivered at the National Cathedral, Washington, D.C., on 31 March 1968. Congressional Record, 9 April 1968.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

January 15, 1929 - April 4, 1968

Born and raised on the Southside of the music city of Memphis, Tenn., the artist simply called, “George", is Stone Records' smooth jazz male vocalist, songwriter, and producer. This new comer with the rich voice texture and soulful crooning will soon earn his place among male balladeers within the music industry with his soothing and melodic vocal interpretations. A multitalented and very versatile vocalist, songwriter, and producer, but very humble spirit, "George", is destined to become a contributor to the long musical legacy of Memphis with his brand of music.

Though influenced by a wide variety of world class vocalists, songwriters, and producers, George is all original in his presentations of what music is; smooth, soulful, sultry, sexy crooning, and melodically interpretive balladry…

"Volume I George", will be an invitation for the listener into a relaxing mood, regardless of your day, with a jazz so smooth, it’s therapeutic. Just listen…There is not a song without a message as "George" enters the industry with "…music for the soul" as his purpose. This is poetry. The look, the voice, his music, the vibe…feel it.

 Have a taste at

Reverbnation.com/Georgethesmoothandsexycrooner

and pick up the debut single,

“I Want To Know”

from

“Volume I George”

when it drops!

“Taste my funk (smile).”

George

Follow George on Twitter:

George

@George_StoneRec

"Strictly business for serious business minds…".

 

BOOK Of THE MONTH

“Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present” By Harriet A. Washington

ISBN-13: 978-0767915472

ISBN-10: 076791547X

  

Whether it’s Soul Contemporary Gospel, Smooth Jazz, Love Ballads, Commercial Jingles, Sound Tracks…

“…we’ve got that song you were looking for”

 

IT’S YOUR HEALTH

Hatred

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Hatred or hate is a deep and extreme emotional dislike. It can be directed against individuals, groups, entities, objects, behaviors, or ideas. Hatred is often associated with feelings of anger, disgust and a disposition towards hostility.

Contents

1 Ethnolinguistics

2 Psychoanalytic views

3 Neurological research

4 Legal issues

5 Religious perspectives

5.1 Christianity

6 See also

Ethnolinguistics

James W. Underhill, in his Ethnolinguistics and Cultural Concepts: truth, love, hate & war, (2012) discusses the origin and the metaphoric representations of hate in various languages. He stresses that love and hate are social, and culturally constructed. For this reason, hate is historically situated. Although it is fair to say that one single emotion exists in English, French (haine), and German (Hass), hate varies in the forms in which it is manifested. A certain relationless hatred is expressed in the French expression J'ai la haine, which has no equivalent in English. While for English-speakers, loving and hating invariably involve an object, or a person, and therefore, a relationship with something or someone, J'ai la haine (literally, I have hate) precludes the idea of an emotion directed at a person. This is a form of frustration, apathy and animosity which churns within the subject but establishes no relationship with the world, other than an aimless desire for destruction. Underhill (following Philippe Roger) also considers French forms of anti-Americanism as a specific form of cultural resentment.

Psychoanalytic views

In psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud defined hate as an ego state that wishes to destroy the source of its unhappiness. More recently, the Penguin Dictionary of Psychology defines hate as a "deep, enduring, intense emotion expressing animosity, anger, and hostility towards a person, group, or object."

Neurological research

The neural correlates of hate have been investigated with an fMRI procedure. In this experiment, people had their brains scanned while viewing pictures of people they hated. The results showed increased activity in the middle frontal gyrus, right putamen, bilaterally in the premotor cortex, in the frontal pole, and bilaterally in the medial insular cortex of the human brain.

Legal issues

In the English language, a hate crime (also known as a "bias-motivated crime") generally refers to criminal acts which are seen to have been motivated by hate. Those who commit hate crimes target victims because of their perceived membership in a certain social group, usually defined by race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, mental disorder, disability, class, ethnicity, nationality, age, gender identity, or political affiliation. Incidents may involve physical assault, destruction of property, bullying, harassment, verbal abuse or insults, or offensive graffiti or letters (hate mail).

Hate speech is speech perceived to disparage a person or group of people based on their social or ethnic group, such as race, sex, age, ethnicity, nationality, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, mental disorder, disability, language ability, ideology, social class, occupation, appearance (height, weight, skin color, etc.), mental capacity, and any other distinction that might be considered a liability. The term covers written as well as oral communication and some forms of behaviors in a public setting. It is also sometimes called antilocution and is the first point on Allport's scale which measures prejudice in a society. In many countries, deliberate use of hate speech is a criminal offence prohibited under incitement to hatred legislation. It is often alleged that the criminalization of hate speech is sometimes used to discourage legitimate discussion of negative aspects of voluntary behavior (such as political persuasion, religious adherence and philosophical allegiance). There is also some question as to whether or not hate speech falls under the protection of freedom of speech in some countries.

Both of these classifications have sparked debate, with counter-arguments such as, but not limited to, a difficulty in distinguishing motive and intent for crimes, as well as philosophical debate on the validity of valuing targeted hatred as a greater crime than general misanthropy and contempt for humanity being a potentially equal crime in and of itself.

Religious perspectives

Christianity

Both the Old and the New Testaments deal with hatred. Ecclesiastes 3:8 teaches that there is a "time to love, and a time to hate;". However, the Old Testament (also known as the Jewish Bible, the Tanakh) also contains condemnations of hatred. For example, "thou shalt not hate thy brother in thy heart". The New Testament emphasizes that evil intentions can be as serious as evil actions. Thus John counted hatred as serious as murder: "whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer and you know that no murderer hath eternal life abiding in himself" (1 John 3).

It is popularly assumed that one can’t "hate" and "love" the same person at the same time. But Psalm 139 says there is a kind of "perfect hatred" which is consistent with love, and is different from the "cruel hatred" shown by God’s enemies. The Hebrew word describing David’s "perfect hatred" (KJV) means that it "brings a process to completion". In other words, goal oriented opposition. The ultimate opposition to those who oppose God would be to get them to love God. Or, failing that, to at least stop them from destroying others. The New Testament describes a similar, if not the same, process: "to deliver...unto Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved...."

Today’s popular characterization of good hatred is to "hate the sin, but love the sinner". Examples of this concept can be found in the Old Testament through David's actions. It is not recorded that David ever physically punished or fought anybody for merely hating or denying God, but only for acts of aggression. He responded to evil proportionately. He defended himself and his nation from violence, but when people merely turned from God in their hearts, without physical violence, he composed Psalms; presumably, this was the kind of "hatred" in David’s mind when he and his son wrote the only five verses in the Old Testament that suggest God "hates" not just the sin but the sinner.

The New Testament unambiguously aligns with the modern concept: it never says God or Jesus hates any person, or that anyone else should. Accordingly, Jesus hated the "doctrines" and "deeds" of the Nicolaitans, but not the Nicolaitans themselves. While Jesus hates sin, He inspires us to love our enemies by pointing out that God equally treats "the evil and the good".

Leviticus 19:17 provides one illustration of how popular concepts of love and hate today have departed from biblical concepts. The verse says "thou shalt not hate", but the rest of the verse explains what that means: "thou shalt...rebuke thy brother, and not [tolerate] sin upon him." Today’s culture often agrees, calling that "tough love". While contemporary culture and the Bible agree on this notion, they are in conflict over the definition of which behaviors deserve admonishment. At the most extreme points of difference, contemporary culture may consider the rebuking endorsed by the Bible to be hatred, especially if the behavior is permissible in secular society.

See also

Discrimination

Gossip

Misanthropy

Revenge

Self-loathing

Two Minutes Hate

Zelyonka attack

 

AFRICAN AMERICANS

“A People Of The Many Descendents Of Afrika”

Part XII

Civil Rights V

African American Civil Rights Movement (1955–1968)

The African American Civil Rights Movement (1955–1968) refers to the social movements in the United States aimed at outlawing racial discrimination against African Americans and restoring voting rights taken away during Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras. This article covers the phase of the movement between 1955 and 1968, particularly in the South. The emergence of the Black Power Movement, which lasted roughly from 1966 to 1975, enlarged the aims of the Civil Rights Movement to include racial dignity, economic and political self-sufficiency, and freedom from oppression by Caucasian Americans.

The movement was characterized by major campaigns of civil resistance. Between 1955 and 1968, acts of nonviolent protest and civil disobedience produced crisis situations between activists and government authorities. Federal, state, and local governments, businesses, and communities often had to respond immediately to these situations that highlighted the inequities faced by African Americans. Forms of protest and/or civil disobedience included boycotts such as the successful Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955–1956) in Alabama; "sit-ins" such as the influential Greensboro sit-ins (1960) in North Carolina; marches, such as the Selma to Montgomery marches (1965) in Alabama; and a wide range of other nonviolent activities.

Noted legislative achievements during this phase of the Civil Rights Movement were passage of Civil Rights Act of 1964, that banned discrimination based on "race, color, religion, or national origin" in employment practices and public accommodations; the Voting Rights Act of 1965, that restored and protected voting rights; the Immigration and Nationality Services Act of 1965, that dramatically opened entry to the U.S. to immigrants other than traditional European groups; and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, that banned discrimination in the sale or rental of housing. African Americans re-entered politics in the South, and across the country young people were inspired to action.

The Supreme Court handed down a landmark decision in the case of Brown v. Board of Education (1954) of Topeka. This decision led to the dismantling of legal segregation in all areas of southern life, from schools to restaurants to public restrooms, but it occurred slowly and only after concerted activism by African Americans. The ruling also brought new momentum to the Civil Rights Movement. Boycotts against segregated public transportation systems sprang up in the South, the most notable of which was the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

Civil rights groups such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) organized across the South with tactics such as boycotts, voter registration campaigns, Freedom Rides and other nonviolent direct action, such as marches, pickets and sit-ins to mobilize around issues of equal access and voting rights. Southern segregationists fought back to block reform. The conflict grew to involve steadily escalating physical violence, bombings and intimidation by Southern Caucasian Americans. Law enforcement responded to protesters with batons, electric cattle prods, fire hoses, attack dogs and mass arrests.

In Virginia, state legislators, school board members and other public officials mounted a campaign of obstructionism and outright defiance to integration called Massive Resistance. It entailed a series of actions to deny state funding to integrated schools and instead fund privately run "segregation academies" for Caucasian American students. Farmville, Virginia, in Prince Edward County, was one of the plaintiff African American communities involved in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision. As a last-ditch effort to avoid court-ordered desegregation, officials in the county shut down the county's entire public school system in 1959 and it remained closed for five years. Caucasian American students were able to attend private schools established by the community for the sole purpose of circumventing integration. The largely African American rural population of the county had little recourse. Some families were split up as parents sent their children to live with relatives in other locales to attend public school; but the majority of Prince Edward's more than 2,000 African American children, as well as many poor Caucasian Americans, simply remained unschooled until federal court action forced the schools to reopen five years later.

Perhaps the high point of the Civil Rights Movement was the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which brought more than 250,000 marchers to the grounds of the Lincoln Memorial and the National Mall in Washington, D.C., to speak out for an end to southern racial violence and police brutality, equal opportunity in employment, equal access in education and public accommodations. The organizers of the march were the "Big Seven" of the Civil Rights Movement: Bayard Rustin the strategist who has been called the "invisible man" of the civil rights movement; labor organizer and initiator of the march, A. Phillip Randolph; Roy Wilkins of the NAACP; Whitney Young, Jr., of the National Urban League; Martin Luther King, Jr., of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC); James Farmer of the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE); and John Lewis of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Also active behind the scenes and sharing the podium with Dr. King was Dorothy Height, head of the National Council of Negro Women. It was at this event, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, that King delivered his historic "I Have a Dream" speech. This march and the conditions which brought it into being are credited with putting pressure on President John F. Kennedy and then Lyndon B. Johnson that culminated in the passage the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that banned discrimination in public accommodations, employment, and labor unions.

The "Mississippi Freedom Summer" of 1964 brought thousands of idealistic youth, African and Caucasian American, to the state to run "freedom schools", to teach basic literacy, history and civics. Other volunteers were involved in voter registration drives. The season was marked by harassment, intimidation and violence directed at civil rights workers and their host families. The disappearance of three youths, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner in Philadelphia, Mississippi, captured the attention of the nation. Six weeks later, searchers found the savagely beaten body of Chaney, an African American man, in a muddy dam alongside the remains of his two Caucasian American companions, who had been shot to death. Outrage at the escalating injustices of the "Mississippi Blood Summer", as it by then had come to be known, and at the brutality of the murders, brought about the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Act struck down barriers to African American disenfranchisement and was the capstone to more than a decade of major civil rights legislation.

By this time, African Americans who questioned the effectiveness of nonviolent protest had gained a greater voice. More militant African American leaders, such as Malcolm X of the Nation of Islam and Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panther Party, called for African Americans to defend themselves, using violence, if necessary. From the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, the Black Power movement urged African Americans to look to Africa for inspiration and emphasized African solidarity, rather than integration.

Following the American Civil War, three constitutional amendments were passed, including the 13th Amendment that ended slavery, the 14th Amendment that gave African Americans citizenship, and the 15th Amendment that gave African American males the right to vote. From 1865 to 1877 the United States underwent a turbulent Reconstruction Era when reconstructed states in the South resisted the enforcement of these constitutional amendments as former Confederate states were brought into the United States. In 1871, President Ulysses S. Grant, the U.S. Army, and U.S. Attorney General Amos T. Akerman, initiated a campaign to destroy the Ku Klux Klan under the Enforcement Acts. However, some states were reluctant to enforce the federal measures of the act and other Caucasian American supremacist groups arose that violently opposed African American equality and suffrage.

After the disputed election of 1876 resulted in the end of Reconstruction, Caucasian Americans in the South regained political control of the region, after mounting intimidation, terrorism, and violence in the elections. Systematic disenfranchisement of African Americans took place in Southern states from 1890 to 1908 and lasted until national civil rights legislation was passed in the mid-1960s. For more than 60 years, for example, African Americans in the South were not able to elect anyone to represent their interests in Congress or local government.

During this period, the Caucasian American-dominated Democratic Party regained political control over the South. The Republican Party—the "party of Lincoln"—which had been the party that most African Americans belonged to, shrank to insignificance as African American voter registration was suppressed. Until 1965, the "solid South" was a one-party system. Outside a few areas (usually in remote Appalachia), the Democratic Party nomination was tantamount to election for state and local office. Most of the Republican Party organizations were controlled by African Americans, and they were represented in the national conventions that nominated Republican presidential candidates. Booker T. Washington was a highly visible advisor to Republicans presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, especially on the matter of federal patronage jobs.

During the same time as African Americans were being disenfranchised, Caucasian American Democrats imposed racial segregation by law. Terrorism and violence against African Americans increased. The system of de jure state-sanctioned racial discrimination and oppression that emerged out of the post-Reconstruction South became known as the "Jim Crow" system. It remained virtually intact into the mid-1950s, when most states integrated their schools. Thus, the early 20th century is a period often referred to as the "nadir of American race relations". While problems and civil rights violations were most intense in the South, social tensions affected African Americans in other regions, as well.

Characteristics of the post-Reconstruction period:

?      Racial segregation. By law, public facilities and government services such as education were divided into separate "white" and "colored" domains. Characteristically, those for colored were underfunded and of inferior quality.

?      Disenfranchisement. When Caucasian American Democrats regained power, they passed laws that made voter registration more inaccessible to African Americans. African American voters were forced off the voting rolls. The number of African American voters dropped dramatically, and they no longer were able to elect representatives. From 1890 to 1908, Southern states of the former Confederacy created constitutions with provisions that disenfranchised tens of thousands of African Americans.

?      Exploitation. Increased economic oppression of African Americans, Latinos, and Asians, denial of economic opportunities, and widespread employment discrimination.

?      Violence. Individual, police, organizational, and mass racial violence against African Americans (and Latinos in the Southwest and Asians in California).

African Americans and other racial minorities rejected this regime. They resisted it in numerous ways and sought better opportunities through lawsuits, new organizations, political redress, and labor organizing (see the African-American Civil Rights Movement (1896–1954)). The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was founded in 1909. It fought to end race discrimination through litigation, education, and lobbying efforts. Its crowning achievement was its legal victory in the Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education (1954) that rejected separate Caucasian American and “colored” school systems and by implication overturned the "separate but equal" doctrine established in Plessy v. Ferguson.

The situation for African Americans outside the South was somewhat better (in most states they could vote and have their children educated, though they still faced discrimination in housing and jobs). From 1910 to 1970, African Americans sought better lives by migrating north and west. A total of nearly seven million African Americans left the South in what was known as the Great Migration.

Invigorated by the victory of Brown and frustrated by the lack of immediate practical effect, private citizens increasingly rejected gradualist, legalistic approaches as the primary tool to bring about desegregation. They were faced with "massive resistance" in the South by proponents of racial segregation and voter suppression. In defiance, African Americans adopted a combined strategy of direct action with nonviolent resistance known as civil disobedience, giving rise to the African American Civil Rights Movement of 1955–1968.

The strategy of public education, legislative lobbying, and litigation that had typified the Civil Rights Movement during the first half of the 20th Century broadened after Brown to a strategy that emphasized "direct action"—primarily boycotts, sit-ins, Freedom Rides, marches and similar tactics that relied on mass mobilization, nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience. This mass action approach typified the movement from 1960 to 1968.

Churches, the centers of their communities, local grassroots organizations, fraternal societies, and African American-owned businesses, mobilized volunteers to participate in broad-based actions. This was a more direct and potentially more rapid means of creating change than the traditional approach of mounting court challenges.

In 1952, the Regional Council of Negro Leadership (RCNL), led by T. R. M. Howard, an African American surgeon, entrepreneur, and planter, organized a successful boycott of gas stations in Mississippi that refused to provide restrooms for African Americans. Through the RCNL, Howard led campaigns to expose brutality by the Mississippi state highway patrol and to encourage African Americans to make deposits in the African American-owned Tri-State Bank of Memphis, Tn. which, in turn, gave loans to civil rights activists who were victims of a "credit squeeze" by the White Citizens' Councils.

The Montgomery Improvement Association—created to lead the Montgomery Bus Boycott managed to keep the boycott going for over a year until a federal court order required Montgomery to desegregate its buses. The success in Montgomery made its leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. a nationally known figure. It also inspired other bus boycotts, such as the highly successful Tallahassee, Florida, boycott of 1956–1957.

In 1957 Dr. King and Rev. John Duffy, the leaders of the Montgomery Improvement Association, joined with other church leaders who had led similar boycott efforts, such as Rev. C. K. Steele of Tallahassee and Rev. T. J. Jemison of Baton Rouge; and other activists such as Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, Ella Baker, A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin and Stanley Levison, to form the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The SCLC, with its headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, did not attempt to create a network of chapters as the NAACP did. It offered training and leadership assistance for local efforts to fight segregation. The headquarters organization raised funds, mostly from Northern sources, to support such campaigns. It made non-violence both its central tenet and its primary method of confronting racism.

Montgomery Improvement Association

The Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) was formed on December 5, 1955 by African American ministers and community leaders in Montgomery, Alabama. Under the leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Edgar Nixon, the MIA was instrumental in guiding the Montgomery Bus Boycott, a successful campaign that focused national attention on racial segregation in the South and catapulted King into the national spotlight.

Following Rosa Parks' arrest on 1 December 1955 for failing to vacate her seat for a Caucasian American male passenger on a Montgomery city bus, Jo Ann Robinson of the Women's Political Council and E. D. Nixon of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) launched plans for a one-day boycott of Montgomery buses on December 5, 1955, the following Monday. Ninety percent of the African American community did not ride the buses that day.

At a meeting that evening attended by several thousand community members, the MIA was established to oversee the continuation and maintenance of the boycott, and King, a young minister new to Montgomery, was elected its chairman president. According to Rosa Parks, "Dr. King was chosen in part because he was relatively new to the community and so did not have any enemies." The organization’s overall mission, extended beyond the boycott campaign, as it sought to "improve the general status of Montgomery, to improve race relations, and to uplift the general tenor of the community."

After the MIA’s initial meeting, the executive committee drafted the demands of the boycott and agreed that the campaign would continue until demands were met. Their demands included courteous treatment by bus operators, first-come, first-served seating, and employment of African American bus drivers.

Thus, despite the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education, the MIA was initially willing to accept a compromise that was consistent with separate but equal rather than complete integration. In this respect, it followed the pattern of earlier boycott campaigns in the Deep South during the 1950s. A prime example was the successful boycott of service stations in Mississippi for refusing to provide restrooms for African Americans. The organizer of that campaign, T.R.M. Howard of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership, had spoken in Montgomery as King's guest at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church only days before Parks's arrest.

Over the next year, the MIA organized carpools and held weekly gatherings with sermons and music to keep the African American community mobilized. Also during this time period, officers of the organization negotiated with Montgomery city leaders, coordinated legal challenges with the NAACP to the city's bus segregation ordinance, and supported the boycott financially, raising money by passing the plate at meetings and soliciting support from northern and southern civil rights organizations.

Following its success in Montgomery, the MIA became one of the founding organizations of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in January 1957. The MIA lost some vital momentum after King moved from Montgomery to Atlanta in 1960, but the organization continued campaigns throughout the 1960s, focusing on voter registration, local school integration, and the integration of Montgomery city parks.

People

Ralph Abernathy

Hugo Black

James Blake

Aurelia Browder

Johnnie Carr

Claudette Colvin

Clifford Durr

Georgia Gilmore

Robert Graetz

Fred Gray

Grover Hall Jr.

T. R. M. Howard

Martin Luther King Jr.

Coretta Scott King

Susie McDonald

E.D. Nixon

Mother Pollard

Jo Ann Robinson

Bayard Rustin

Glenn Smiley

Mary Louise Smith

Debbie Jones formerly Abbie Medlock

Rosa Parks

Rosa Louise McCauley Parks

Rosa Louise McCauley Parks (February 4, 1913 – October 24, 2005) was an African American civil rights activist, whom the U.S. Congress called "the first lady of civil rights" and "the mother of the freedom movement". Her birthday, February 4, and the day she was arrested, December 1, have both become Rosa Parks Day, commemorated in the U.S. states of California and Ohio.

On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Parks refused to obey bus driver James F. Blake's order that she give up her seat in the colored section to a Caucasian American passenger, after the Caucasian American section was filled. Parks was not the first person to resist bus segregation. Others had taken similar steps in the twentieth century, including Irene Morgan in 1946, Sarah Louise Keys in 1955, and the members of the Browder v. Gayle lawsuit (Claudette Colvin, Aurelia Browder, Susie McDonald, and Mary Louise Smith) arrested months before Parks. NAACP organizers believed that Parks was the best candidate for seeing through a court challenge after her arrest for civil disobedience in violating Alabama segregation laws though eventually her case became bogged down in the state courts.

Parks' act of defiance and the Montgomery Bus Boycott became important symbols of the modern Civil Rights Movement. She became an international icon of resistance to racial segregation. She organized and collaborated with civil rights leaders, including Edgar Nixon, president of the local chapter of the NAACP; and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a new minister in town who gained national prominence in the civil rights movement.

At the time, Parks was secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP. She had recently attended the Highlander Folk School, a Tennessee center for training activists for workers' rights and racial equality. She acted as a private citizen "tired of giving in". Although widely honored in later years, she also suffered for her act; she was fired from her job as a seamstress in a local department store.

Eventually, she moved to Detroit, Michigan, where she briefly found similar work. From 1965 to 1988 she served as secretary and receptionist to John Conyers, an African American U.S. Representative. After retirement, Parks wrote her autobiography, and lived a largely private life in Detroit. In her final years, she suffered from dementia.

Parks received national recognition, including the NAACP's 1979 Spingarn Medal, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Congressional Gold Medal, and a posthumous statue in the United States Capitol's National Statuary Hall. Upon her death in 2005, she was the first woman and second non-U.S. government official to lie in honor at the Capitol Rotunda.

Rosa Parks was born Rosa Louise McCauley in Tuskegee, Alabama, on February 4, 1913, to Leona (née Edwards) and James McCauley, a teacher and a carpenter, respectively. She was of African, Cherokee-Creek, and Scots-Irish ancestry. She was small as a child, suffering from poor health with chronic tonsillitis. When her parents separated, she moved with her mother to Pine Level, just outside the capital of Montgomery. She grew up on a farm with her maternal grandparents, mother, and younger brother Sylvester. They all were members of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), a century-old independent African American denomination founded by free African Americans in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in the early nineteenth century.

McCauley attended rural schools until the age of eleven. A student at the Industrial School for Girls in Montgomery, she took academic and vocational courses. Parks went on to a laboratory school set up by the Alabama State Teachers College for Negroes for secondary education, but dropped out in order to care for her grandmother and later her mother, after they became ill.

Around the start of the 20th century, the former Confederate states had passed new constitutions and electoral laws that effectively disenfranchised African American voters and, in Alabama, many poor Caucasian American voters as well. Under the Caucasian American-established Jim Crow laws, passed after Democrats regained control of southern legislatures, racial segregation was imposed in public facilities and retail stores in the South, including public transportation. Bus and train companies enforced seating policies with separate sections for African and Caucasian Americans. School bus transportation was unavailable in any form for African American schoolchildren in the South, and African American education was always underfunded.

Parks recalled going to elementary school in Pine Level, where school buses took Caucasian American students to their new school and African American students had to walk to theirs:

"I'd see the bus pass every day... But to me, that was a way of life; we had no choice but to accept what was the custom. The bus was among the first ways I realized there was a black world and a white world."

Although Parks' autobiography recounts early memories of the kindness of Caucasian American strangers, she could not ignore the racism of her society. When the Ku Klux Klan marched down the street in front of their house, Parks recalls her grandfather guarding the front door with a shotgun. The Montgomery Industrial School, founded and staffed by Caucasian American northerners for African American children, was burned twice by arsonists. Its faculty was ostracized by the Caucasian American community.

In 1932, Rosa married Raymond Parks, a barber from Montgomery. He was a member of the NAACP, which at the time was collecting money to support the defense of the Scottsboro Boys, a group of African American men falsely accused of raping two Caucasian American women. Rosa took numerous jobs, ranging from domestic worker to hospital aide. At her husband's urging, she finished her high school studies in 1933, at a time when less than 7% of African Americans had a high school diploma. Despite the Jim Crow laws and discrimination by registrars, she succeeded in registering to vote on her third try.

In December 1943, Parks became active in the Civil Rights Movement, joined the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP, and was elected secretary. She later said, "I was the only woman there, and they needed a secretary, and I was too timid to say no." She continued as secretary until 1957.

In 1944, in her role as secretary, she investigated the gang-rape of Recy Taylor, an African American woman from Abbeville, Alabama. Parks and other civil rights activists organized the "Committee for Equal Justice for Mrs. Recy Taylor," launching what the Chicago Defender called "the strongest campaign for equal justice to be seen in a decade."

Although never a member of the Communist Party she and her husband did attend meetings and the Scottsboro case was a case that had been brought to prominence by the Communist Party.

In the 1940s, Parks and her husband were members of the Voters' League. Sometime soon after 1944, she held a brief job at Maxwell Air Force Base, which as federal property did not permit racial segregation. She rode on its integrated trolley. Speaking to her biographer, Parks noted, "You might just say Maxwell opened my eyes up." Parks worked as a housekeeper and seamstress for Clifford and Virginia Durr, a Caucasian American couple. Politically liberal, the Durrs became her friends. They encouraged—and eventually helped sponsor—Parks in the summer of 1955 to attend the Highlander Folk School, an education center for activism in workers' rights and racial equality in Monteagle, Tennessee.

In August 1955, African American teenager Emmett Till was brutally murdered after reportedly flirting with a young Caucasian American woman while visiting relatives in Mississippi. On November 27, 1955, Rosa Parks attended a mass meeting in Montgomery that addressed this case as well as the recent murders of the activists George W. Lee and Lamar Smith. The featured speaker was T. R. M. Howard, an African American civil rights leader from Mississippi who headed the Regional Council of Negro Leadership. The discussions concerned actions African Americans could take to work for their rights.

In 1900, Montgomery had passed a city ordinance (essentially only Caucasian Americans could vote) to segregate bus passengers by race. Conductors were empowered to assign seats to achieve that goal. According to the law, no passenger would be required to move or give up his seat and stand if the bus was crowded and no other seats were available. Over time and by custom, however, Montgomery bus drivers adopted the practice of requiring African American riders to move when there were no Caucasian American-only seats left.

The first four rows of seats on each Montgomery bus were reserved for Caucasian Americans. Buses had "colored" sections for African American people generally in the rear of the bus, although African Americans comprised more than 75% of the ridership. The sections were not fixed but were determined by placement of a movable sign. African American people could sit in the middle rows until the Caucasian American section filled; if more Caucasian Americans needed seats, African Americans were to move to seats in the rear, stand, or, if there was no room, leave the bus. African American people could not sit across the aisle in the same row as Caucasian American people. The driver could move the "colored" section sign, or remove it altogether. If Caucasian American people were already sitting in the front, African American people had to board at the front to pay the fare, then disembark and reenter through the rear door.

For years, the African American community had complained that the situation was unfair. Parks said, "My resisting being mistreated on the bus did not begin with that particular arrest...I did a lot of walking in Montgomery."

One day in 1943, Parks boarded the bus and paid the fare. She then moved to her seat but driver James F. Blake told her to follow city rules and enter the bus again from the back door. Parks exited the bus, but before she could re-board at the rear door, Blake drove off, leaving her to walk home in the rain.

After working all day, Parks boarded the Cleveland Avenue bus around 6 p.m., Thursday, December 1, 1955, in downtown Montgomery. She paid her fare and sat in an empty seat in the first row of back seats reserved for African Americans in the "colored" section. Near the middle of the bus, her row was directly behind the ten seats reserved for Caucasian American passengers. Initially, she did not notice that the bus driver was the same man, James F. Blake, who had left her in the rain in 1943. As the bus traveled along its regular route, all of the Caucasian American-only seats in the bus filled up. The bus reached the third stop in front of the Empire Theater, and several Caucasian American passengers boarded.

Blake noted that the front of the bus was filled with Caucasian American passengers, with two or three standing. He moved the "colored" section sign behind Parks and demanded that four African American people give up their seats in the middle section so that the Caucasian American passengers could sit. Years later, in recalling the events of the day, Parks said,

"When that white driver stepped back toward us, when he waved his hand and ordered us up and out of our seats, I felt a determination cover my body like a quilt on a winter night."

By Parks' account, Blake said, "Y'all better make it light on yourselves and let me have those seats." Three of them complied. Parks said, "The driver wanted us to stand up, the four of us. We didn't move at the beginning, but he says, 'Let me have these seats.' And the other three people moved, but I didn't." The African American man sitting next to her gave up his seat.

Parks moved, but toward the window seat; she did not get up to move to the redesignated colored section. Blake said, "Why don't you stand up?" Parks responded, "I don't think I should have to stand up." Blake called the police to arrest Parks. When recalling the incident for Eyes on the Prize, a 1987 public television series on the Civil Rights Movement, Parks said, "When he saw me still sitting, he asked if I was going to stand up, and I said, 'No, I'm not.' And he said, 'Well, if you don't stand up, I'm going to have to call the police and have you arrested.' I said, 'You may do that.'"

During a 1956 radio interview with Sydney Rogers in West Oakland several months after her arrest, Parks said she had decided, "I would have to know for once and for all what rights I had as a human being and a citizen."

In her autobiography, My Story she said:

“People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”

When Parks refused to give up her seat, a police officer arrested her. As the officer took her away, she recalled that she asked, "Why do you push us around?" She remembered him saying, "I don't know, but the law's the law, and you're under arrest." She later said, "I only knew that, as I was being arrested, that it was the very last time that I would ever ride in humiliation of this kind..."

Parks was charged with a violation of Chapter 6, Section 11 segregation law of the Montgomery City code, although technically she had not taken a Caucasian American-only seat; she had been in a colored section. Edgar Nixon, president of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP and leader of the Pullman Porters Union, and her friend Clifford Durr bailed Parks out of jail the next evening.

Nixon conferred with Jo Ann Robinson, an Alabama State College professor and member of the Women's Political Council (WPC), about the Parks' case. Robinson believed it important to seize the opportunity and stayed up all night mimeographing over 35,000 handbills announcing a bus boycott. The Women's Political Council was the first group to officially endorse the boycott.

On Sunday, December 4, 1955, plans for the Montgomery Bus Boycott were announced at African American churches in the area, and a front-page article in The Montgomery Advertiser helped spread the word. At a church rally that night, those attending agreed unanimously to continue the boycott until they were treated with the level of courtesy they expected, until African American drivers were hired, and until seating in the middle of the bus was handled on a first-come basis.

The next day, Parks was tried on charges of disorderly conduct and violating a local ordinance. The trial lasted 30 minutes. After being found guilty and fined $10, plus $4 in court costs, Parks appealed her conviction and formally challenged the legality of racial segregation. In a 1992 interview with National Public Radio's Lynn Neary, Parks recalled:

“I did not want to be mistreated, I did not want to be deprived of a seat that I had paid for. It was just time... there was opportunity for me to take a stand to express the way I felt about being treated in that manner. I had not planned to get arrested. I had plenty to do without having to end up in jail. But when I had to face that decision, I didn't hesitate to do so because I felt that we had endured that too long. The more we gave in, the more we complied with that kind of treatment, the more oppressive it became.”

On the day of Parks' trial — December 5, 1955 — the WPC distributed the 35,000 leaflets. The handbill read,

"We are...asking every Negro to stay off the buses Monday in protest of the arrest and trial ... You can afford to stay out of school for one day. If you work, take a cab, or walk. But please, children and grown-ups, don't ride the bus at all on Monday. Please stay off the buses Monday."

It rained that day, but the African American community persevered in their boycott. Some rode in carpools, while others traveled in African American-operated cabs that charged the same fare as the bus, 10 cents. Most of the remainder of the 40,000 African American commuters walked, some as far as 20 miles (30 km).

That evening after the success of the one-day boycott, a group of 16 to 18 people gathered at the Mt. Zion AME Zion Church to discuss boycott strategies. The group agreed that a new organization was needed to lead the boycott effort if it were to continue. Rev. Ralph David Abernathy suggested the name "Montgomery Improvement Association" (MIA). The name was adopted, and the MIA was formed. Its members elected as their president Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, a relative newcomer to Montgomery, who was a young and mostly unknown minister of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church.

That Monday night, 50 leaders of the African American community gathered to discuss actions to respond to Parks' arrest. Edgar Nixon, the president of the NAACP, said, "My God, look what segregation has put in my hands!" Parks was the ideal plaintiff for a test case against city and state segregation laws, as she was a responsible, mature woman with an excellent reputation. King said that Mrs. Parks was regarded as "one of the finest citizens of Montgomery—not one of the finest Negro citizens, but one of the finest citizens of Montgomery." Parks was securely married and employed, possessed a quiet and dignified demeanor, and was politically savvy.

Rosa's court case was being slowed down in appeals through the Alabama courts on their way to a Federal appeal and the process could have taken years. Holding together a boycott for that length of time would have been a great strain. In the end, African American residents of Montgomery continued the boycott for 381 days, at considerable personal sacrifice. Dozens of public buses stood idle for months, severely damaging the bus transit company's finances, until the city repealed its law requiring segregation on public buses following the US Supreme Court ruling in Browder v. Gayle that it was unconstitutional. Rosa was not included as a plaintiff in the Browder decision because the attorney Fred Gray concluded the courts would perceive they were attempting to circumvent her prosecution on her charges working their way through the Alabama state court system.

Parks played an important part in raising international awareness of the plight of African Americans and the civil rights struggle. King wrote in his 1958 book Stride Toward Freedom that Parks' arrest was the catalyst rather than the cause of the protest: "The cause lay deep in the record of similar injustices." He wrote, "Actually, no one can understand the action of Mrs. Parks unless he realizes that eventually the cup of endurance runs over, and the human personality cries out, 'I can take it no longer.'"

After her arrest, Parks became an icon of the Civil Rights Movement but suffered hardships as a result. Due to economic sanctions used against activists, she lost her job at the department store. Her husband quit his job after his boss forbade him to talk about his wife or the legal case. Parks traveled and spoke extensively about the issues.

In 1957, Raymond and Rosa Parks left Montgomery for Hampton, Virginia; mostly because she was unable to find work. She also disagreed with King and other leaders of Montgomery's struggling civil rights movement about how to proceed. In Hampton, she found a job as a hostess in an inn at Hampton Institute, a historically African American college.

Later that year, at the urging of her brother and sister-in-law in Detroit, Michigan, Sylvester and Daisy McCauley, Rosa and Raymond Parks, and her mother moved north to join them. Parks worked as a seamstress until 1965.

That year, John Conyers, an African American U.S. Representative, hired her as a secretary and receptionist for his congressional office in Detroit. She held this position until she retired in 1988. In a telephone interview with CNN on October 24, 2005, Conyers recalled,

"You treated her with deference because she was so quiet, so serene — just a very special person ... There was only one Rosa Parks."

The 1970s was a decade of loss and suffering for Parks in her personal life. Her family was plagued with illness; she and her husband had suffered stomach ulcers for years and both required hospitalization. Then in their 60s, her brother Sylvester and husband were both diagnosed with cancer, as was her mother. Parks sometimes visited three hospitals in the same day. In spite of her fame and constant speaking engagements, Parks was not a wealthy woman. She donated most of the money from speaking to civil rights causes, and lived on her staff salary and her husband's pension. Medical bills and time missed from work caused financial strain that required her to accept assistance from church groups and admirers.

Her husband died of throat cancer on August 19, 1977 and her brother, her only sibling, died of cancer that November. Her personal ordeals caused her to become removed from the civil rights movement. She learned from a newspaper of the death of Fannie Lou Hamer, once a close friend. Parks suffered two broken bones in a fall on an icy sidewalk, an injury which caused considerable and recurring pain. She decided to move with her mother into an apartment for senior citizens. There she nursed her mother Leona through the final stages of cancer and geriatric dementia until she died in 1979 at the age of 92.

In 1980 Parks, widowed and without immediate family, rededicated herself to civil rights and educational organizations. She co-founded the Rosa L. Parks Scholarship Foundation for college-bound high school seniors, to which she donated most of her speaker fees. In February 1987 she co-founded, with Elaine Eason Steele, the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development, an institute that runs the "Pathways to Freedom" bus tours which introduce young people to important civil rights and Underground Railroad sites throughout the country. Though her health declined as she entered her seventies, Parks continued to make many appearances and devoted considerable energy to these causes.

In 1992, Parks published Rosa Parks: My Story, an autobiography aimed at younger readers, which recounts her life details her life leading to her decision to keep her seat on the bus. A few years later, she published her memoir, titled Quiet Strength (1995), which focuses on her faith in her life. On August 30, 1994, Joseph Skipper, an African American drug addict, entered her home and attacked the 81-year-old Parks in the course of a robbery. The incident sparked outrage throughout the United States. After his arrest, Skipper said that he had not known he was in Parks' home but recognized her after entering. Skipper asked, "Hey, aren't you Rosa Parks?" to which she replied, "Yes." She handed him $3 when he demanded money, and an additional $50 when he demanded more. Before fleeing, Skipper struck Parks in the face. Skipper was arrested and charged with various breaking and entering offenses against Parks and other neighborhood victims. He admitted guilt and, on August 8, 1995, was sentenced to eight to 15 years in prison. Suffering anxiety upon returning to her small central Detroit house following the ordeal, Parks moved into Riverfront Towers, a secure high-rise apartment building where she lived for the rest of her life.

In 1994 the Ku Klux Klan applied to sponsor a portion of United States Interstate 55 in Saint Louis County and Jefferson County, near St. Louis, Missouri, for clean up (which allowed them to have signs stating that this section of highway was maintained by the organization). Since the state could not refuse the KKK's sponsorship, the Missouri legislature voted to name the highway section the "Rosa Parks Highway". When asked how she felt about this honor, she is reported to have commented, "It is always nice to be thought of."

In 1999 Parks filmed a cameo appearance for the television series Touched by an Angel. It was to be her last appearance on film; health problems made her increasingly an invalid.

In 2002 Parks received an eviction notice from her $1,800.00 per month apartment due to non-payment of rent. Parks was incapable of managing her own financial affairs by this time due to age-related physical and mental decline. Her rent was paid from a collection taken by Hartford Memorial Baptist Church in Detroit. When her rent became delinquent and her impending eviction was highly publicized in 2004, executives of the ownership company announced they had forgiven the back rent and would allow Parks, by then 91 and in extremely poor health, to live rent free in the building for the remainder of her life. Her heirs and various interest organizations alleged at the time that her financial affairs had been mismanaged.

OutKast had a song, "Rosa Parks", the most successful radio single of their 1998 album Aquemini. They had used her name without permission and, in March 1999, a lawsuit (Rosa Parks v. LaFace Records) was filed on Parks' behalf against the American hip-hop duo and their record company. The lawsuit was settled April 15, 2005; OutKast, their producer and record labels paid Parks an undisclosed cash settlement. They also agreed to work with the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute to create educational programs about the life of Rosa Parks. The record label and OutKast admitted to no wrongdoing. Responsibility for the payment of legal fees was not disclosed.

The documentary Mighty Times: The Legacy of Rosa Parks (2001) received a 2002 nomination for Academy Award for Documentary Short Subject. She collaborated that year in a TV movie of her life starring Angela Bassett.

The film Barbershop (2002) featured a barber, played by Cedric the Entertainer, arguing with others that other African Americans before Parks had been active in bus integration, but she got renown as an NAACP secretary. The activists Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton launched a boycott against the film, contending it was "disrespectful", but NAACP president Kweisi Mfume stated he thought the controversy was "overblown." Parks was offended and boycotted the NAACP 2003 Image Awards ceremony, which Cedric hosted.

The Neville Brothers recorded a song about Parks called "Sister Rosa" on their 1989 album Yellow Moon. A music video for the song was also made.

Parks resided in Detroit until she died of natural causes at the age of 92 on October 24, 2005, in her apartment on the east side of the city. She and her husband never had children and she outlived her only sibling. She was survived by her sister-in-law, 13 nieces and nephews and their families, and several cousins, most of them residents of Michigan or Alabama.

City officials in Montgomery and Detroit announced on October 27, 2005, that the front seats of their city buses would be reserved with black ribbons in honor of Parks until her funeral. Parks' coffin was flown to Montgomery and taken in a horse-drawn hearse to the St. Paul African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church, where she lay in repose at the altar on October 29, 2005, dressed in the uniform of a church deaconess. A memorial service was held there the following morning. One of the speakers, United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, said that if it had not been for Parks, she would probably have never become the Secretary of State. In the evening the casket was transported to Washington, D.C. and transported by a bus similar to the one in which she made her protest, to lie in honor in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol.

Since the founding in 1852 of the practice of lying in state in the rotunda, Parks was the 31st person, the first American who had not been a U.S. government official, and the second private person (after the French planner Pierre L'Enfant) to be honored in this way. She was the first woman and the second African American in state in the Capitol. An estimated 50,000 people viewed the casket there, and the event was broadcast on television on October 31, 2005. A memorial service was held that afternoon at Metropolitan AME Church in Washington, DC.

With her body and casket returned to Detroit, for two days, Parks lay in repose at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History. Her funeral service was seven hours long and was held on November 2, 2005, at the Greater Grace Temple Church in Detroit. After the service, an honor guard from the Michigan National Guard laid the U.S. flag over the casket and carried it to a horse-drawn hearse, which was intended to carry it, in daylight, to the cemetery. As the hearse passed the thousands of people who were viewing the procession, many clapped and cheered loudly and released white balloons. Parks was interred between her husband and mother at Detroit's Woodlawn Cemetery in the chapel's mausoleum. The chapel was renamed the Rosa L. Parks Freedom Chapel in her honor. Parks had previously prepared and placed a headstone on the selected location with the inscription "Rosa L. Parks, wife, 1913–."

When Parks died, her fame was such that ESPN noted her death on the "Bottom Line," its on-screen ticker, on all of its networks. Usually, only information related to sports is found there.

Legacy and honors

Detroit renamed 12th Street "Rosa Parks Boulevard."

1979, the NAACP awarded Parks the Spingarn Medal, its highest honor,

1980, she received the Martin Luther King Jr. Award.

1983, she was inducted into Michigan Women's Hall of Fame for her achievements in civil rights.

1990, Parks was invited to be part of the group welcoming Nelson Mandela upon his release from prison in South Africa.

Parks was in attendance as part of Interstate 475 outside of Toledo, Ohio is named after Parks.

1992, she received the Peace Abbey Courage of Conscience Award along with Dr. Benjamin Spock and others at the Kennedy Library and Museum in Boston, Massachusetts.

1995, she received the Academy of Achievement's Golden Plate Award in Williamsburg, Virginia.

1996, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor given by the U.S. executive branch.

1998, she was the first to receive the International Freedom Conductor Award given by the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center.

1999, she received the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest award given by the U.S. legislative branch, the medal bears the legend "Mother of the Modern Day Civil Rights Movement"

She receives the Detroit-Windsor International Freedom Festival Freedom Award.

Time magazine named Parks one of the 20 most influential and iconic figures of the 20th century.

President Bill Clinton honored her in his State of the Union Address, saying, "She's sitting down with the first lady tonight, and she may get up or not as she chooses."

2000, her home state awarded her the Alabama Academy of Honor,

she receives the first Governor's Medal of Honor for Extraordinary Courage.

She was awarded two dozen honorary doctorates from universities worldwide

She is made an honorary member of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority.

The Rosa Parks Library and Museum on the campus of Troy University in Montgomery was dedicated to her.

2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante listed Parks on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.

A portion of the Interstate 10 freeway in Los Angeles is named in her honor.

2003, Bus No. 2857 on which Parks was riding is restored and placed on display in The Henry Ford Museum

2004, In the Los Angeles County MetroRail system, the Imperial Highway/Wilmington station, where the Blue Line connects with the Green Line, has been officially named the "Rosa Parks Station".

2005, On October 30, 2005 President George W. Bush issued a proclamation ordering that all flags on U.S. public areas both within the country and abroad be flown at half-staff on the day of Parks' funeral.

Metro Transit in King County, Washington placed posters and stickers dedicating the first forward-facing seat of all its buses in Parks' memory shortly after her death

The American Public Transportation Association declared December 1, 2005, the 50th anniversary of her arrest, to be a "National Transit Tribute to Rosa Parks Day".

On that anniversary, President George W. Bush signed Pub.L. 109–116, directing that a statue of Parks be placed in the United States Capitol's National Statuary Hall. In signing the resolution directing the Joint Commission on the Library to do so, the President stated:

“By placing her statue in the heart of the nation's Capitol, we commemorate her work for a more perfect union, and we commit ourselves to continue to struggle for justice for every American.”

Portion of Interstate 96 in Detroit, Michigan was renamed by the state legislature as the Rosa Parks Memorial Highway in December 2005.

2006, At Super Bowl XL, played at Detroit's Ford Field, long-time Detroit residents Coretta Scott King and Parks were remembered and honored by a moment of silence. The Super Bowl was dedicated to their memory.

Parks' nieces and nephews and Martin Luther King III joined the coin toss ceremonies, standing alongside former University of Michigan star Tom Brady who flipped the coin.

On February 14, Nassau County, New York, NY Executive, Thomas Suozzi announced that the Hempstead Transit Center would be renamed the Rosa Parks Hempstead Transit Center in her honor.

2007, Nashville, Tennessee, renamed MetroCenter Boulevard (8th Avenue North) (US 41A and TN 12) in September 2007 as Rosa L. Parks Boulevard.

2009, On July 14, 2009, the Rosa Parks Transit Center opened in Detroit at the corner of Michigan and Cass Avenues.

2010, In Grand Rapids, Michigan, a plaza in the heart of the city is named Rosa Parks Circle.

2012, President Barack Obama visited the famous Rosa Parks bus at the Henry Ford Museum after an event in Dearborn, Michigan, April 18, 2012.

2012, A street in West Valley City, Utah's second largest city, leading to the Utah Cultural Celebration Center is renamed Rosa Parks Drive.

2013, On February 1, President Barack Obama proclaimed February 4, 2013, as the "100th Anniversary of the Birth of Rosa Parks." He called "upon all Americans to observe this day with appropriate service, community, and education programs to honor Rosa Parks's enduring legacy."

On February 4, to celebrate Rosa Parks' 100th birthday, the Henry Ford Museum declared the day a "National Day of Courage" with 12 hours of virtual and on-site activities featuring nationally recognized speakers, musical and dramatic interpretative performances, a panel presentation of Rosa's Story and a reading of the tale Quiet Strength. The actual bus on which Rosa Parks sat was made available for the public to board and sit in the seat that Rosa Parks refused to give up.

On February 4, 2,000 birthday wishes gathered from people throughout the United States were transformed into 200 graphics messages at a celebration held on her 100th Birthday at the Davis Theater for the Performing Arts in Montgomery, Alabama. This was the 100th Birthday Wishes Project managed by the Rosa Parks Museum at Troy University and the Mobile Studio and was also a declared event by the Senate.

During both events the USPS unveiled a postage stamp in her honor.

On February 27, Parks became the first African American woman to have her likeness depicted in National Statuary Hall. The monument is a part of the Capitol Art Collection among nine other females featured in the National Statuary Hall Collection.

(Continued. Email [email protected] for this week’s full copy of STEPPING STONES!)

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