The death of Rosa Parks underscores that the generation responsible for the key victories of the civil-rights movement is fading into history, leaving its survivors with the challenge of keeping the movement’s memory and work alive even as today’s youth often seem disengaged.
“As people get older and people pass, it becomes more and more difficult to have that sort of firsthand knowledge” of the fight for integration, said U.S. Rep. John Lewis, a Georgia Democrat who first met Parks as a 17-year-old student and activist. “It becomes a little more difficult to pass it on.”
Lewis, who once headed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, added that the social challenges of today – persistent racial gaps in poverty, education and wealth, among others – highlight the continued need for activists and teachers to honor Parks’ spirit.
“Her life should inspire a generation yet unborn to stand up,” he said.
Parks is one of a handful of civil-rights figures, along with Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, whose name most young people seem to know.
But many are more familiar with “Rosa Parks,” the hit song by the hip-hop group OutKast, than with her full story, said Renada Johnson, a 25-year-old graduate student at Bowie State University in Maryland who met Parks in 1997.
In 1955, Parks was a seamstress and longtime secretary for the local NAACP who defied segregation laws and refused to give up her seat in a whites-only section of a public bus in Montgomery, Ala.
Then 42, she inspired tens of thousands of working-class blacks – led by King – to boycott the local buses for more than a year.
Finally, the Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling that declared Montgomery’s segregated seating laws unconstitutional. The effort highlighted persistent bias against blacks across the nation.
After she died Monday at age 92, Parks was remembered as a quiet woman of steely resolve, whose simple act helped spark the biggest movement for social change in American history.
