Rosa Parks Quotes
In it not easy to remain rational and normal mentally in such a setting where, even in our airport in Montgomery, there is a white waiting room... There are restroom facilities for white ladies and colored women, white men and colored men. We stand outside after being served at the same ticket counter instead of sitting on the inside.
Parks, Rosa. Rosa Parks Papers. Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
Sumner would later become a Senator. However over a century before Brown v. Board of Education finally outlawed segregated schools, Sumner made one of the basic legal arguments that was involved in the case.
Reconstruction was the period in the South after the Civil War. The change that emancipation brought to the white South was traumatic, and there was a constant struggle between those who wanted the Blacks to be integrated into Southern Society—and those Southerners who wanted to create a society that would be as close to slavery as possible, So the Klu Klux Klan and other terrorist organizations formed and with lynching and other intimidation, much of the initial progress of Reconstruction was rolled back and did not get reinstated until the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts were passed in 1964.
Blacks were fighting and dying in WWII. They were equal when they were under fire, but otherwise not. The war was against fascist protagonists whose creed was inequality while the allies were upholding freedom and equality. But making that aspiration a reality was difficult.
Rosa Louise McCauley Parks was an American activist in the civil rights movement best known for her pivotal role in the Montgomery bus boycott. The United States Congress has called her "the first lady of civil rights" and "the mother of the freedom movement".
