* WARNING: THIS IS AN UNOFFICIAL, INTRODUCTORY COPY OF THE BILL.
THE OFFICIAL COPY CONSIDERED BY THE CITY COUNCIL IS THE FIRST READER COPY.
INTRODUCTORY*
CITY OF BALTIMORE
COUNCIL BILL R
(Resolution)
Introduced by: President Dixon
A RESOLUTION ENTITLED
A COUNCIL RESOLUTION concerning
Title
Rosa Lee Parks - From the Back of the Bus to the Forefront of the Civil Rights Movement
FOR the purpose of celebrating the life of Rosa Lee Parks, the "mother of the civil rights movement", the champion of the Montgomery Bus boycott that culminated in the 1964 federal Civil Rights Act, and the recipient of the long-deferred 1999 Congressional Medal of honor; and wishing her a final peaceful journey home.
Body
Recitals
In 1955, Rosa Lee Parks, an active member of the local chapter of the NAACP in Montgomery, Alabama, defied the Jim Crow laws in place since the post- Civil War Reconstruction that required separation of the races in buses, restaurants, and public accommodations throughout the south, by refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white man, and changed the course of American history.
Her refusal to comply with rules that required blacks to yield their seats to whites led to her arrest which triggered a 381-day boycott of the bus system organized by a then little-known Baptist minister, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., who was later to earn a Nobel Peace Prize and a preeminent place in history and in the hearts and consciousness of people of all colors in this country and the world over.
The Montgomery bus boycott took place a year after Baltimore's own Thurgood Marshall won the most important case of the century, Brown v. Board of Education, which ended ...
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