Tag: Montgomery Alabama

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.

Slavery has indeed marked this nation. Its soot leaves a residue the best detergent cannot wipe away or wash out. Truth – bitter, the missing ingredient is hard to swallow, let alone see – yet this is what The National Memorial for Peace and Justice and by extension The Legacy Museum: From Slavery to Mass Incarceration demands we face. It is not in your head or imagination that these atrocities to other people reside.

First and foremost, we must stay on message. And what is that message? We are uniting to End Mass Incarceration and Prison Slavery. In doing so, we have to keep at the forefront of our heart, mind and spirit that slavery – which predominates over mass incarceration – is an economic enterprise system that is mathematically put together and thus capable of being scientifically taken apart.

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.