According to reports: ” Hundreds of people, including some of Michigan’s political elite, gathered Monday to celebrate the late Rosa Parks on what would have been her 100th birthday by unveiling a postage stamp in her honor steps from the Alabama bus on which she stared down segregation nearly 60 years ago”.
A young lawyer who worked on Conyers’ staff while Parks worked at Conyers’ Detroit office Deputy Postmaster General Ronald Stroman was allowed to sit on the bus by himself in Park’s seat as officials cleared the vehicle for him to do so. Stroman looked around the bus and gathered his thoughts before saying: “It’s such a powerful experience to be actually in the seat that Rosa Parks sat in. It’s almost emotional , very overwhelming to be here.”
Sadly Miss Parks is not alive to witness the recognition because she passed away in 2005.
For those who are unaware of Rosa Parks, she became one of the enduring figures of the Civil Rights movement when she refused to give up her seat in the colored section to a white man after the whites-only section filled up on a bus in Montgomery, Ala., Her defiance and the ensuing black boycott of the city bus system encouraged the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. rise to national prominence.
“This is being done in sight of the bus where future generations can sit in a seat where Rosa Parks sat and refused to budge and in a seat where the world was changed,” U.S. Sen. Carl Levin said before he and U.S. Rep. John Conyers, a fellow Democrat, pulled the curtain to reveal the Rosa Parks Forever Stamp, which bears her 1950’s likeness.
The Parks stamp is the second in a set of civil rights stamps being issued this year by the U.S. Postal Service.
