Tag: Claudette Colvin

Rosa Parks is a central figure in the 20th century movement for Black lives, both before and after she refused to give up her seat to a white passenger the evening of Dec. 1, 1955. Her political activism began in Montgomery, Alabama, in the 1930s and continued after her family’s move to Detroit, Michigan, in 1957. Seventy years after the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Trump administration is hard at work erasing the history of the immense struggle Black America has waged for freedom.

Feb. 4, 2013, marked the 100th anniversary of the birth of Rosa Louise MaCauley Parks in Tuskegee, Alabama. Parks was born in the segregated South, where African Americans were subjected to daily humiliations aimed at maintaining the system of exploitation and national oppression which grew out of slavery and the failure of reconstruction.

On April 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, while supporting Black sanitation workers fighting for collective bargaining rights. His support was part of his “Poor People’s Campaign,” a second phase of the civil rights movement.

On Feb. 18, 7 p.m., at Modern Times Bookstore, Krip-Hop Nation will present an author panel of new books by Black disabled writers and friends, including Toni Hickman of Texas, Adarro Minton of New York, Allen Jones of San Francisco and friends of Krip-Hop Nation, DC Curtis and Bones Kendall of Los Angeles.

Although America’s Declaration of Independence and Constitution are premised on the principles of democracy, the historical treatment of America’s citizens of color is replete with racial dichotomies. Today’s youth need to know that Dr. King was only 25 when he began to fight back with the year-long Montgomery bus boycott.