一位美国黑人妇女的政治遗产
http://www.creaders.net 万维读者网 2005年10月28日 12:04 PM
【万维读者网】美国时间10月24日晚，一位92岁的黑人妇女，告别了人世。她悄无声息地走了，但却引起世界反响。她的辞别，使当年她那平凡而充满巨大勇气的行动，使当年因她的行动而引发的波澜壮阔的反种族歧视斗争，再现世界面前。她昭示人们，自由民主应该是各国人民自己的选择。
据国际金融报报道，罗萨・帕克斯，曾是一位美国黑人女裁缝。50年前，以自由民主自傲于世的美国，却还实行着残酷的种族隔离制度，黑人被置于受歧视、侮辱的境地。
1955年12月1日，罗萨・帕克斯下班后，上了公共汽车，她如往常一样，没有去坐前排的座位，因为那是白人专座，她坐在了中排的座位。车行驶几站后，座位坐满了。这时，上来一位白人男子。按当地法律规定，如果满座，黑人必须将座位让给白人。于是，司机喝令坐着的4位黑人站起来让座。3位黑人站起来了，但是罗萨・帕克斯没有，她坐着。坐着，是一个平凡到不能再平凡的行动，但在当时当地，这却是一个需要将生死置于度外的行动。罗萨・帕克斯可能因此被白人种族主义者打死，或者被警察逮捕。果然，司机叫来了警察，警察吼叫道：“不站起来，就逮捕你。”但是，罗萨・帕克斯仍然纹丝不动，只是平静地说：“不。”一个弱女子刚刚能让人听见的平静回答，却震动了整个美国，甚至世界。因为这声“不”，代表了所有黑人对种族歧视的抗议和拒绝。
罗萨・帕克斯因此被捕。但是，罗萨・帕克斯的勇气，激励了当地的黑人群众，人们纷纷参加了抗议和抵制运动。美国著名的人权运动领袖马丁・路德・金，就是在这一抗议和抵制运动中，崭露头角的。
在美国民众的强大压力下，美国最高法院不得不裁定当地在公交车上实行种族隔离制度违宪。
事后，罗萨・帕克斯在回忆她的这一行动时说：“当我被捕时，我并没有意识到自己的行动会激发黑人民众如此强烈的情绪。那一天，对我而言，就像其他日子一样平常，惟一让它变得不同寻常的原因，是百万民众的觉醒。”正因为罗萨・帕克斯反映和代表了美国民众的觉醒，她被视为美国黑人“民权运动之母”。
与50年前相比，现在美国的种族歧视状况，当然有了明显改观。但从上述历史中，人们可以知道，美国人民的自由民主权利，不是与生具有的，更不是某个外国用军舰和战车送给他们的，而是美国人民英勇斗争的结果，是美国人民自己的选择。
遗憾的是，现在美国有一些人忘记了这一点，他们不愿意承认美国的自由民主有过一个艰难的进步过程，而且现在仍然需要进步，他们要越俎代庖，代替各国人民，为他们选择自由民主。用《民主论》的作者夏兰斯基的话来说就是：那种认为民主不应该从外部“强加”，只能从内部进行的观点。
美国的不少有识之士，看到了这种观点和在这种观点指导下的行动的背理和危害。美国前国务卿奥尔布赖特便指出：“对美国来说，支持民主与自由是正确的政策。”“当前的问题是，它带有太多美国印记。”“你不能将民主强加于人；那不是民主之举。你必须培育和支持它。”同时，奥尔布赖特又说：“我始终信奉一种合乎道德的民主的外交政策。”
在悼念罗萨・帕克斯时，认真思考一下，怎样的外交政策才是“合乎道德的民主的”，无论对美国，对世界都是有益的。
______________________________________________________
1992年，帕克斯的??《吝诉・帕克斯：我的故事》出版。1996年，帕克斯?被授予了表彰?于美?社?做出突出??的人士的?靳自由?章，1999年，她又被授予全美最高?柞的阻?金色?章。
2000年11月，吝诉・帕克斯博物疝和??疝在蒙哥褚利市檫疝，博物疝里特意展出了一蓥1955年?的公共汽?，上面?在播放著?年帕克斯被捕前陪那名白人男子之殓的??。
此外，帕克斯的?奇???被拍成了一部硷?片《?大的?代：吝诉・帕克斯的精神啁?》，呃部硷?片在2002年?诹得了?斯卡最佳硷?短片的提名。
______________________________________________________
Civil Rights Pioneer Rosa Parks, 92, Dies
By BREE FOWLER, Associated Press Writer Tue Oct 25,12:24 PM ET
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051025/ap_on_re_us/obit_rosa_parks
DETROIT - Nearly 50 years ago, Rosa Parks made a simple decision that sparked a revolution. When a white man demanded she give up her seat on a Montgomery, Ala., bus, the then 42-year-old seamstress said no.
At the time, she couldn't have known it would secure her a revered place in American history. But her one small act of defiance galvanized a generation of activists, including a young Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and earned her the title "mother of the civil rights movement."
Mrs. Parks died Monday evening at her home of natural causes, with close friends by her side, said Gregory Reed, an attorney who represented her for the past 15 years. She was 92.
Monique Reynolds, 37, a native of Montgomery, Ala., called Mrs. Parks an inspiration who had lived to see the changes brought about by the civil rights movement.
"Martin Luther King never saw this, Malcolm X never saw this," said Reynolds, who now lives in Detroit. "She was able to see this and enjoy it."
In 1955, Jim Crow laws in place since the post-Civil War Reconstruction required separation of the races in buses, restaurants and public accommodations throughout the South, while legally sanctioned racial discrimination kept blacks out of many jobs and neighborhoods in the North.
Mrs. Parks, an active member of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, was riding on a city bus Dec. 1, 1955, when a white man demanded her seat.
She refused, despite rules requiring blacks to yield their seats to whites. Two black Montgomery women had been arrested earlier that year on the same charge, but Mrs. Parks was jailed. She also was fined $14.
U.S. Rep John Conyers, in whose office Mrs. Parks worked for more than 20 years, remembered the civil rights leader as someone whose impact on the world was immeasurable, but who never sought the limelight.
"Everybody wanted to explain Rosa Parks and wanted to teach Rosa Parks, but Rosa Parks wasn't very interested in that," he said. "She wanted them to understand the government and to understand their rights and the Constitution that people are still trying to perfect today."
Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick said he felt a personal tie to the civil rights icon: "She stood up by sitting down. I'm only standing here because of her."
Speaking to an audience of military spouses at Bolling Air Force Base in Washington, President Bush said Mrs. Parks' 1955 refusal to give up her seat "was an act of personal courage."
Bush described her as "one of the most inspiring women of the 20th century" and said that she would always have a "special place" in American history.
Speaking in 1992, Mrs. Parks said history too often maintains "that my feet were hurting and I didn't know why I refused to stand up when they told me. But the real reason of my not standing up was I felt that I had a right to be treated as any other passenger. We had endured that kind of treatment for too long."
Her arrest triggered a 381-day boycott of the bus system organized by a then little-known Baptist minister, the Rev. King, who later earned the Nobel Peace Prize for his work.
"At the time I was arrested I had no idea it would turn into this," she said 30 years later. "It was just a day like any other day. The only thing that made it significant was that the masses of the people joined in."
The Montgomery bus boycott, which came one year after the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark declaration that separate schools for blacks and whites were "inherently unequal," marked the start of the modern civil rights movement.
The movement culminated in the 1964 federal Civil Rights Act, which banned racial discrimination in public accommodations.
After taking her public stand for civil rights, Mrs. Parks had trouble finding work in Alabama. Amid threats and harassment, she and her husband, Raymond, moved to Detroit in 1957. She worked as an aide in Conyers' Detroit office from 1965 until retiring Sept. 30, 1988. Raymond Parks died in 1977.
Mrs. Parks said upon retiring from her job with Conyers that she wanted to devote more time to the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development. The institute, incorporated in 1987, is devoted to developing leadership among Detroit's young people and initiating them into the struggle for civil rights.
"Rosa Parks: My Story," was published in February 1992. In 1994 she brought out "Quiet Strength: The Faith, the Hope and the Heart of a Woman Who Changed a Nation," and in 1996 a collection of letters called "Dear Mrs. Parks: A Dialogue With Today's Youth."
She was among the civil rights leaders who addressed the Million Man March in October 1995.
In 1996, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, awarded to civilians making outstanding contributions to American life. In 1999, she was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, the nation's highest civilian honor.
Mrs. Parks received dozens of other awards, ranging from induction into the Alabama Academy of Honor to an NAACP Image Award for her 1999 appearance on CBS' "Touched by an Angel."
She was born Rosa Louise McCauley on Feb. 4, 1913, in Tuskegee, Ala. Family illness interrupted her high school education, but after she married Raymond Parks in 1932, he encouraged her and she earned a diploma in 1934. He also inspired her to become involved in the NAACP.
Mrs. Parks was a beloved aunt to 13 nieces and nephews.
"She wasn't the mother of the civil rights movement to me," Susan McCauley, one of her nieces, said last year. "She was the woman I wanted to become."
Her later years were not without difficult moments. In 1994, her home was invaded by a 28-year-old man who beat her and took $53. She was treated at a hospital and released. The man, Joseph Skipper, pleaded guilty, blaming the crime on his drug problem.
Mrs. Parks rarely was seen in public after 2001, when she canceled a meeting with President Bush. In court papers filed in September 2004 in connection with her lawsuit over the rap group OutKast's song "Rosa Parks," her lawyers said she had dementia.
After losing the OutKast lawsuit, Reed, her attorney, said Mrs. Parks "has once again suffered the pains of exploitation." A later suit against OutKast's record company was settled out of court.
In 2002, her landlord threatened to evict her from her high-rise apartment in downtown Detroit after her caregivers missed rental payments. Riverfront Associates decided in October 2004 to let her live there rent-free permanently.
Looking back in 1988, Mrs. Parks said she worried that black young people took legal equality for granted.
Older blacks, she said "have tried to shield young people from what we have suffered. And in so doing, we seem to have a more complacent attitude.
"We must double and redouble our efforts to try to say to our youth, to try to give them an inspiration, an incentive and the will to study our heritage and to know what it means to be black in America today."
At a celebration in her honor that same year, she said: "I am leaving this legacy to all of you ... to bring peace, justice, equality, love and a fulfillment of what our lives should be. Without vision, the people will perish, and without courage and inspiration, dreams will die ― the dream of freedom and peace."
___
Associated Press Writer JoAnne Viviano contributed to this report from Detroit.
___________________________________________________
Rosa Parks earned the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
http://www.creaders.net 万维读者网 2005年10月28日 12:04 PM
【万维读者网】美国时间10月24日晚，一位92岁的黑人妇女，告别了人世。她悄无声息地走了，但却引起世界反响。她的辞别，使当年她那平凡而充满巨大勇气的行动，使当年因她的行动而引发的波澜壮阔的反种族歧视斗争，再现世界面前。她昭示人们，自由民主应该是各国人民自己的选择。
据国际金融报报道，罗萨・帕克斯，曾是一位美国黑人女裁缝。50年前，以自由民主自傲于世的美国，却还实行着残酷的种族隔离制度，黑人被置于受歧视、侮辱的境地。
1955年12月1日，罗萨・帕克斯下班后，上了公共汽车，她如往常一样，没有去坐前排的座位，因为那是白人专座，她坐在了中排的座位。车行驶几站后，座位坐满了。这时，上来一位白人男子。按当地法律规定，如果满座，黑人必须将座位让给白人。于是，司机喝令坐着的4位黑人站起来让座。3位黑人站起来了，但是罗萨・帕克斯没有，她坐着。坐着，是一个平凡到不能再平凡的行动，但在当时当地，这却是一个需要将生死置于度外的行动。罗萨・帕克斯可能因此被白人种族主义者打死，或者被警察逮捕。果然，司机叫来了警察，警察吼叫道：“不站起来，就逮捕你。”但是，罗萨・帕克斯仍然纹丝不动，只是平静地说：“不。”一个弱女子刚刚能让人听见的平静回答，却震动了整个美国，甚至世界。因为这声“不”，代表了所有黑人对种族歧视的抗议和拒绝。
罗萨・帕克斯因此被捕。但是，罗萨・帕克斯的勇气，激励了当地的黑人群众，人们纷纷参加了抗议和抵制运动。美国著名的人权运动领袖马丁・路德・金，就是在这一抗议和抵制运动中，崭露头角的。
在美国民众的强大压力下，美国最高法院不得不裁定当地在公交车上实行种族隔离制度违宪。
事后，罗萨・帕克斯在回忆她的这一行动时说：“当我被捕时，我并没有意识到自己的行动会激发黑人民众如此强烈的情绪。那一天，对我而言，就像其他日子一样平常，惟一让它变得不同寻常的原因，是百万民众的觉醒。”正因为罗萨・帕克斯反映和代表了美国民众的觉醒，她被视为美国黑人“民权运动之母”。
与50年前相比，现在美国的种族歧视状况，当然有了明显改观。但从上述历史中，人们可以知道，美国人民的自由民主权利，不是与生具有的，更不是某个外国用军舰和战车送给他们的，而是美国人民英勇斗争的结果，是美国人民自己的选择。
遗憾的是，现在美国有一些人忘记了这一点，他们不愿意承认美国的自由民主有过一个艰难的进步过程，而且现在仍然需要进步，他们要越俎代庖，代替各国人民，为他们选择自由民主。用《民主论》的作者夏兰斯基的话来说就是：那种认为民主不应该从外部“强加”，只能从内部进行的观点。
美国的不少有识之士，看到了这种观点和在这种观点指导下的行动的背理和危害。美国前国务卿奥尔布赖特便指出：“对美国来说，支持民主与自由是正确的政策。”“当前的问题是，它带有太多美国印记。”“你不能将民主强加于人；那不是民主之举。你必须培育和支持它。”同时，奥尔布赖特又说：“我始终信奉一种合乎道德的民主的外交政策。”
在悼念罗萨・帕克斯时，认真思考一下，怎样的外交政策才是“合乎道德的民主的”，无论对美国，对世界都是有益的。
______________________________________________________
1992年，帕克斯的??《吝诉・帕克斯：我的故事》出版。1996年，帕克斯?被授予了表彰?于美?社?做出突出??的人士的?靳自由?章，1999年，她又被授予全美最高?柞的阻?金色?章。
2000年11月，吝诉・帕克斯博物疝和??疝在蒙哥褚利市檫疝，博物疝里特意展出了一蓥1955年?的公共汽?，上面?在播放著?年帕克斯被捕前陪那名白人男子之殓的??。
此外，帕克斯的?奇???被拍成了一部硷?片《?大的?代：吝诉・帕克斯的精神啁?》，呃部硷?片在2002年?诹得了?斯卡最佳硷?短片的提名。
______________________________________________________
Civil Rights Pioneer Rosa Parks, 92, Dies
By BREE FOWLER, Associated Press Writer Tue Oct 25,12:24 PM ET
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051025/ap_on_re_us/obit_rosa_parks
DETROIT - Nearly 50 years ago, Rosa Parks made a simple decision that sparked a revolution. When a white man demanded she give up her seat on a Montgomery, Ala., bus, the then 42-year-old seamstress said no.
At the time, she couldn't have known it would secure her a revered place in American history. But her one small act of defiance galvanized a generation of activists, including a young Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and earned her the title "mother of the civil rights movement."
Mrs. Parks died Monday evening at her home of natural causes, with close friends by her side, said Gregory Reed, an attorney who represented her for the past 15 years. She was 92.
Monique Reynolds, 37, a native of Montgomery, Ala., called Mrs. Parks an inspiration who had lived to see the changes brought about by the civil rights movement.
"Martin Luther King never saw this, Malcolm X never saw this," said Reynolds, who now lives in Detroit. "She was able to see this and enjoy it."
In 1955, Jim Crow laws in place since the post-Civil War Reconstruction required separation of the races in buses, restaurants and public accommodations throughout the South, while legally sanctioned racial discrimination kept blacks out of many jobs and neighborhoods in the North.
Mrs. Parks, an active member of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, was riding on a city bus Dec. 1, 1955, when a white man demanded her seat.
She refused, despite rules requiring blacks to yield their seats to whites. Two black Montgomery women had been arrested earlier that year on the same charge, but Mrs. Parks was jailed. She also was fined $14.
U.S. Rep John Conyers, in whose office Mrs. Parks worked for more than 20 years, remembered the civil rights leader as someone whose impact on the world was immeasurable, but who never sought the limelight.
"Everybody wanted to explain Rosa Parks and wanted to teach Rosa Parks, but Rosa Parks wasn't very interested in that," he said. "She wanted them to understand the government and to understand their rights and the Constitution that people are still trying to perfect today."
Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick said he felt a personal tie to the civil rights icon: "She stood up by sitting down. I'm only standing here because of her."
Speaking to an audience of military spouses at Bolling Air Force Base in Washington, President Bush said Mrs. Parks' 1955 refusal to give up her seat "was an act of personal courage."
Bush described her as "one of the most inspiring women of the 20th century" and said that she would always have a "special place" in American history.
Speaking in 1992, Mrs. Parks said history too often maintains "that my feet were hurting and I didn't know why I refused to stand up when they told me. But the real reason of my not standing up was I felt that I had a right to be treated as any other passenger. We had endured that kind of treatment for too long."
Her arrest triggered a 381-day boycott of the bus system organized by a then little-known Baptist minister, the Rev. King, who later earned the Nobel Peace Prize for his work.
"At the time I was arrested I had no idea it would turn into this," she said 30 years later. "It was just a day like any other day. The only thing that made it significant was that the masses of the people joined in."
The Montgomery bus boycott, which came one year after the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark declaration that separate schools for blacks and whites were "inherently unequal," marked the start of the modern civil rights movement.
The movement culminated in the 1964 federal Civil Rights Act, which banned racial discrimination in public accommodations.
After taking her public stand for civil rights, Mrs. Parks had trouble finding work in Alabama. Amid threats and harassment, she and her husband, Raymond, moved to Detroit in 1957. She worked as an aide in Conyers' Detroit office from 1965 until retiring Sept. 30, 1988. Raymond Parks died in 1977.
Mrs. Parks said upon retiring from her job with Conyers that she wanted to devote more time to the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development. The institute, incorporated in 1987, is devoted to developing leadership among Detroit's young people and initiating them into the struggle for civil rights.
"Rosa Parks: My Story," was published in February 1992. In 1994 she brought out "Quiet Strength: The Faith, the Hope and the Heart of a Woman Who Changed a Nation," and in 1996 a collection of letters called "Dear Mrs. Parks: A Dialogue With Today's Youth."
She was among the civil rights leaders who addressed the Million Man March in October 1995.
In 1996, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, awarded to civilians making outstanding contributions to American life. In 1999, she was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, the nation's highest civilian honor.
Mrs. Parks received dozens of other awards, ranging from induction into the Alabama Academy of Honor to an NAACP Image Award for her 1999 appearance on CBS' "Touched by an Angel."
She was born Rosa Louise McCauley on Feb. 4, 1913, in Tuskegee, Ala. Family illness interrupted her high school education, but after she married Raymond Parks in 1932, he encouraged her and she earned a diploma in 1934. He also inspired her to become involved in the NAACP.
Mrs. Parks was a beloved aunt to 13 nieces and nephews.
"She wasn't the mother of the civil rights movement to me," Susan McCauley, one of her nieces, said last year. "She was the woman I wanted to become."
Her later years were not without difficult moments. In 1994, her home was invaded by a 28-year-old man who beat her and took $53. She was treated at a hospital and released. The man, Joseph Skipper, pleaded guilty, blaming the crime on his drug problem.
Mrs. Parks rarely was seen in public after 2001, when she canceled a meeting with President Bush. In court papers filed in September 2004 in connection with her lawsuit over the rap group OutKast's song "Rosa Parks," her lawyers said she had dementia.
After losing the OutKast lawsuit, Reed, her attorney, said Mrs. Parks "has once again suffered the pains of exploitation." A later suit against OutKast's record company was settled out of court.
In 2002, her landlord threatened to evict her from her high-rise apartment in downtown Detroit after her caregivers missed rental payments. Riverfront Associates decided in October 2004 to let her live there rent-free permanently.
Looking back in 1988, Mrs. Parks said she worried that black young people took legal equality for granted.
Older blacks, she said "have tried to shield young people from what we have suffered. And in so doing, we seem to have a more complacent attitude.
"We must double and redouble our efforts to try to say to our youth, to try to give them an inspiration, an incentive and the will to study our heritage and to know what it means to be black in America today."
At a celebration in her honor that same year, she said: "I am leaving this legacy to all of you ... to bring peace, justice, equality, love and a fulfillment of what our lives should be. Without vision, the people will perish, and without courage and inspiration, dreams will die ― the dream of freedom and peace."
___
Associated Press Writer JoAnne Viviano contributed to this report from Detroit.
___________________________________________________
Rosa Parks earned the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
