For
Immediate Release February 27, 2013
Remarks
by the President at Dedication of Statue Honoring Rosa Parks -- US Capitol
United
States Capitol
11:45
A.M. EST
THE
PRESIDENT: Mr. Speaker, Leader Reid,
Leader McConnell, Leader Pelosi, Assistant Leader Clyburn; to the friends and
family of Rosa Parks; to the distinguished guests who are gathered here today.
This
morning, we celebrate a seamstress, slight in stature but mighty in
courage. She defied the odds, and she
defied injustice. She lived a life of
activism, but also a life of dignity and grace.
And in a single moment, with the simplest of gestures, she helped change
America -- and change the world.
Rosa
Parks held no elected office. She
possessed no fortune; lived her life far from the formal seats of power. And yet today, she takes her rightful place
among those who’ve shaped this nation’s course.
I thank all those persons, in particular the members of the
Congressional Black Caucus, both past and present, for making this moment
possible. (Applause.)
A
childhood friend once said about Mrs. Parks, “Nobody ever bossed Rosa around
and got away with it.” (Laughter.) That’s what an Alabama driver learned on
December 1, 1955. Twelve years earlier,
he had kicked Mrs. Parks off his bus simply because she entered through the
front door when the back door was too crowded.
He grabbed her sleeve and he pushed her off the bus. It made her mad enough, she would recall,
that she avoided riding his bus for a while.
And
when they met again that winter evening in 1955, Rosa Parks would not be
pushed. When the driver got up from his
seat to insist that she give up hers, she would not be pushed. When he threatened to have her arrested, she
simply replied, “You may do that.” And
he did.
A
few days later, Rosa Parks challenged her arrest. A little-known pastor, new to town and only
26 years old, stood with her -- a man named Martin Luther King, Jr. So did thousands of Montgomery, Alabama
commuters. They began a boycott --
teachers and laborers, clergy and domestics, through rain and cold and
sweltering heat, day after day, week after week, month after month, walking
miles if they had to, arranging carpools where they could, not thinking about
the blisters on their feet, the weariness after a full day of work -- walking
for respect, walking for freedom, driven by a solemn determination to affirm
their God-given dignity.
Three
hundred and eighty-five days after Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat, the
boycott ended. Black men and women and
children re-boarded the buses of Montgomery, newly desegregated, and sat in
whatever seat happen to be open. (Applause.) And with that victory, the entire edifice of
segregation, like the ancient walls of Jericho, began to slowly come tumbling
down.
It’s
been often remarked that Rosa Parks’s activism didn’t begin on that bus. Long before she made headlines, she had stood
up for freedom, stood up for equality -- fighting for voting rights, rallying
against discrimination in the criminal justice system, serving in the local
chapter of the NAACP. Her quiet
leadership would continue long after she became an icon of the civil rights
movement, working with Congressman Conyers to find homes for the homeless,
preparing disadvantaged youth for a path to success, striving each day to right
some wrong somewhere in this world.
And
yet our minds fasten on that single moment on the bus -- Ms. Parks alone in
that seat, clutching her purse, staring out a window, waiting to be
arrested. That moment tells us something
about how change happens, or doesn’t happen; the choices we make, or don’t make. “For now we see through a glass, darkly,”
Scripture says, and it’s true. Whether
out of inertia or selfishness, whether out of fear or a simple lack of moral
imagination, we so often spend our lives as if in a fog, accepting injustice,
rationalizing inequity, tolerating the intolerable.
Like
the bus driver, but also like the passengers on the bus, we see the way things
are -- children hungry in a land of plenty, entire neighborhoods ravaged by
violence, families hobbled by job loss or illness -- and we make excuses for
inaction, and we say to ourselves, that's not my responsibility, there’s
nothing I can do.
Rosa
Parks tell us there’s always something we can do. She tells us that we all have
responsibilities, to ourselves and to one another. She reminds us that this is how change happens
-- not mainly through the exploits of the famous and the powerful, but through
the countless acts of often anonymous courage and kindness and fellow feeling
and responsibility that continually, stubbornly, expand our conception of
justice -- our conception of what is possible.
Rosa
Parks’s singular act of disobedience launched a movement. The tired feet of those who walked the dusty
roads of Montgomery helped a nation see that to which it had once been blind. It is because of these men and women that I
stand here today. It is because of them
that our children grow up in a land more free and more fair; a land truer to
its founding creed.
And
that is why this statue belongs in this hall -- to remind us, no matter how
humble or lofty our positions, just what it is that leadership requires; just
what it is that citizenship requires.
Rosa Parks would have turned 100 years old this month. We do well by
placing a statue of her here. But we can
do no greater honor to her memory than to carry forward the power of her
principle and a courage born of conviction.
May
God bless the memory of Rosa Parks, and may God bless these United States of
America. (Applause.)
END
11:55 A.M. EST
