Rosa Parks remembered as a quiet woman with a faith that moved mountains

(RNS) People who knew civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks before her arrest in 1955 remember her as a quiet seamstress whose faith in God gave her strength, confidence and authority.

c. 2005 Religion News Service

TUSKEGEE, Ala. – People who knew civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks before her arrest on a Montgomery bus in 1955 remember her as a quiet seamstress whose faith in God gave her strength, confidence and authority.

“She was always very serene, very calm and quiet. But there was a fire smoldering under all of that quietness,” said E.D. Nixon Jr., 77, an actor and singer whose stage name is Nick LaTour.


Nixon, son of the late E.D. Nixon, who helped organize the bus boycott that followed Parks’ arrest, said Parks was a fine “Christian lady.”

“I think her faith had a lot to do with her demeanor, her personality, because when you have certain beliefs, you’re comfortable with a lot of situations. It gives you confidence,” he said.

Nixon and others praised Parks at memorial services Wednesday (Oct. 26) that drew a few hundred people to the town square and to the municipal complex in Tuskegee, where Parks was born in 1913. She died Monday in Detroit, where she’d lived since 1957.

Nixon said Parks and his father worked together for years in the NAACP. Before her arrest, Parks had been secretary of Montgomery’s chapter since 1943.

Parks’ arrest, trial and conviction in December 1955 for refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus to a white man sparked a 381-day bus boycott by black people. It lasted until the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the integration of city buses. The boycott helped launch the modern civil rights movement.

“She walked with authority,” said Farrell J. Duncombe, 63, pastor of Washington Chapel AME Church in Tuskegee. “I saw her as one who loved the Lord, one who loved people and who was not reluctant to share what she had with others.” Parks was Duncombe’s Sunday school teacher at St. Paul AME Church in Montgomery, and his father was the pastor.

Parks’ body will lie in the St. Paul AME sanctuary Saturday from 3 p.m. to midnight, said Pastor Joseph Rembert Sr. A memorial service will be held there at 10:30 a.m. Sunday. Both events are open to the public.


Fred Gray, who was one of Parks’ attorneys after her arrest, said, “If Mrs. Parks were here today, she would remind us that the struggle has not ended, that racism is still a major problem in this country, that the disparity that exists between the majority and the minority in economics, in health care, in education, all are problems that need to be resolved.

“If she has left us a legacy at all,” he said, it is: “We must finish the task.”

Duncombe recalled that when he was principal of Montgomery’s Lanier High School, Parks spoke to students there in December 1996 after “Little Farrell” asked her to do it.

Asked then how people could follow in her footsteps, Parks replied, “I would suggest that anyone who is concerned about freedom and equality should have a positive attitude with all people, and that they would be looking around to see where was it they may be able to help in some way.

“And that they would, first of all, not have any prejudices in themselves against anybody for any reason,” Parks said, “and if they run into something unpleasant, that they still be very polite and just state whatever they have to in a positive way, and maybe they will win other persons over.”

MO/PH END RNS

(David White writes for the Birmingham (Ala.) News.)

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