Rosa Parks has passed on.
I felt that as a person, if I did not want to be mistreated, there was no way I was going to stop being mistreated if I accepted it continuously…
— Rosa Parks
Actually no one can understand the action of Mrs. Parks unless he realizes that eventually the cup of endurance runs over, and the human personality cries out, ‘I can take it no longer.’ Mrs. Parks’s refusal to move back was her intrepid affirmation that she had had enough. It was an individual expression of a timeless longing for human dignity and freedom. She was not ‘planted’ there by the N.A.A.C.P. or any other organization; she was planted there by her personal sense of dignity and self-respect. She was anchored to that seat by the accumulated indignities of days gone by and the boundless aspirations of generations yet unborn.
– “Stride Toward Freedom”, Dr. Martin Luther King
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