Happy 101st Birthday to 'Mother of the Civil Rights Movement' Rosa Parks

Today, Muslim News Magazine would like to honor and celebrate Rosa Parks on what would have been her 101st birthday.

Rosa Parks is known as mother of the civil rights movement. When she courageously refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus, Mrs. Parks became the impetus for changing laws in the segregated south. Her subsequent arrest resulted in a mass boycott of city buses bringing the civil rights movement and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to national prominence.

"People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day... No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in."

In 1999, Rosa Parks was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal of Honor by president William Clinton. After her death in 2005, she became the first woman in American history to lie in honor at the Capitol Rotunda in Washington DC. Since that time a US Postal stamp has been created with her image and on February 27, 2013 she became the first African American to have her likeness depicted in National Statuary Hall.

Even Nelson Mandela considered her a hero. Upon his release from prison, he told her "You sustained me while I was in prison all those years."

Parks passed away at the age of 92, but before she passed, at an event celebrating her life in 1998, she shared her thoughts on how far we'd come since the days of Jim Crow.

"Racism is still with us," she told a reporter. "But it is up to us to prepare our children for what they have to meet, and, hopefully, we shall overcome."