Barack Obama

Rosa Parks statue to stand in Capitol

Friday, December 2, 2005

CHICAGO SUN-TIMES
BY LYNN SWEET

WASHINGTON -- President Bush asked Congress Thursday to renew portions of a landmark voting rights act as he signed a measure championed by Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.) to erect a statue of civil rights icon Rosa Parks in the Capitol.

Jackson and his namesake father have been campaigning for months to extend and strengthen key provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act due to expire in 2007.

During the bill signing ceremony, which makes Parks the first African-American woman to be portrayed in the statue-filled Capitol, Bush called on Congress to back reauthorization of the act which removed voting barriers some states, particularly in the south, placed on minorities.

"The United States Congress should renew the Voting Rights Act of 1965,'' Bush said.

However, that broad statement does not say whether the Bush White House will ask for revisions of sections of the law that the Jacksons argue are crucial to maintaining minority access to the polls.

"We do not know where he stands,'' Jackson Jr. said. Jackson said the Bush statement of support-however vague -- "provides critical momentum'' to maintaining, if not strengthening the law.

Bush signed the bill on the 50th anniversary of Parks' historic Dec. 1, 1955 refusal on a Montgomery, Ala., bus to give up her seat to a white man.

"Her arrest sparked a boycott of the Montgomery bus lines by its black passengers, and the formation of a local association of African Americans led by a young preacher named Martin Luther King, Jr.,'' Bush said.

"The boycott ended more than a year later, after the Supreme Court struck down segregation on buses. What had begun as a simple act of civil disobedience ended up galvanizing the modern movement for civil rights.

"By refusing to give in, Rosa Parks called America back to its founding promise of equality and justice for everyone.

"When the police officer boarded the bus and told the seamstress that he had to arrest her, he explained that the law was the law. Rosa and the black ministers who defended her invoked more than the law; they invoked the Constitution and pointed to a higher law,'' the president said.

Figure in place within 2 years

Parks, who died in October at the age of 92, became the first woman whose body laid in honor in the Capitol Rotunda.

Jackson's bill, championed by Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), with Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) among the legislation's co-sponsors in the Senate, calls for a statue to be placed in Statuary Hall within two years.

"Rosa Parks held no public office, but when the history of this country is written, her name and her legacy will be remembered long after the names of senators and presidents have been forgotten," Obama said in a statement.