Tag: Imari Obadele

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.

On March 8, hundreds of people, especially from the South and particularly Jackson, Miss., came to mourn and reflect on the life of Mayor Chokwe Lumumba, who died suddenly on Feb. 25 at the age of 66. Starting with a March 5 tribute at the historically Black college, Jackson State University, Mayor Lumumba’s life was memorialized for several days, ending with the masses lining the streets for his burial motorcade. A collection of tributes to the late great mayor of Jackson, Miss.

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.