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>> And now, we're going to find out which of these ladies really is the incredible Rosa Parks.  Will the real Rosa Parks please stand up?
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>> Rosa Parks is often thought as a sort of meek seamstress who one day sort of accidentally stumbles into history and refuses to give up her seat on the bus, launching the modern Civil Rights Movement.  And that version, taught in schools and often celebrated nationally, very much distorts and limits who Rosa Parks actually was.  Her activism starts two decades before her historic bus stand on December 1st, 1955 and will continue for four decades after.
>> As far as I can remember, during my lifetime, I resisted the idea of being mistreated and pushed around because of my race, and I felt that all people should be free, regardless of their color.
>> One day, when I was about 10, I met a little white boy named Franklin on the road.  He was about my size, maybe a little bit larger.  He said something to me, and he threatened to hit me, balled up his fist as if to give me a sock.  I picked up a brick and dared him to hit me.  He thought better of the idea and went away.  I love that, I mean, I love that.  At 10, she knew the deep injustice of things.
>> Perhaps the case that guts her the most is the case about a 16-year-old by the name of Jeremiah Reeves.  Jeremiah Reeves was a high school student, a jazz drummer, and delivered groceries, and had started having a relationship with a young white woman.  It got found out.  She cried rape.
>> They actually put him in the electric chair at Kilby Prison and told him if he didn't confess, he would be electrocuted on the spot, and so he gave his false confession.  And so, she began writing letters and trying to organize around blocking that execution, got Dr. King involved, and it didn't succeed, and he was executed, and she would tell me how devastating that was, and how it broke her heart.
>> This is a Rosa Parks letter from 1956.  I cried bitterly that I would be lynched, rather than be run over by them.  They could get the rope ready for me at any time they wanted to do their lynching.  Well, my neck was spared of the lynch rope, and my body was never riddled by bullets or dragged by an auto.  I felt that I was lynched many times in mind and spirit.
>> She was a believer that you had to dissent, that you had to voice your objection, even if you couldn't see that that would do any good.
>> Rosa Parks, like my mom, has her own definition of who she is, and she doesn't let anybody change that definition.  Help plan for a better world for tomorrow by giving all the love, care, and guidance to our children of today.
>> As a child, when you read about important people, I thought that these were physical giants, people who spoke a language that was different from the language that I spoke, and I found that those were regular people, and so I have always felt that a person does not have to be out of this world to accomplish something extraordinary.
>> We must have courage, determination to go on with the task of becoming free, not only for ourselves, but for the nation and the world.  Cooperate with each other, have faith in God and in ourselves.  And I just think we underestimate the kind of courage it took to stand up to these forces that had silenced and marginalized black people from the very day we came to this continent, and yet she was taking them on.  I think it was really an amazing part of her legacy, was the courage, the strength, the bravery that defined her as a human being.
>> I think when we're involved in excavating American history and coming to terms with our real history, I think too often we find that most history is a sanitized, Madison-Avenue version of it, but she's a lifelong activist, and she represents the variety of strategies to combat the persistent racism in the United States.  I think it's important that we liberate Rosa Parks and liberate ourselves from the tyranny of this superficial history.
>> Hurt, harm, and danger.  The dark closet of my mind, so much to remember.  And yes, it's somewhere in the dark closet of my mind, too.  It can't help but be in the dark closet of your mind, and you should never forget.  There is so much to remember.  But I also know that this exhibit will show that Rosa Parks made a difference in moving us forward, and move forward we must, even as we remember the past.  We have to look to a brighter future.
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