Rosa Parks

Back in Montgomery during my growing up there, it was completely legally enforced racial segregation, and of course, I struggled against it for a long time. I felt that it was not right to be deprived of freedom when we were living in the Home of the Brave and Land of the Free. Of course, when I refused to stand up, on the orders of the bus driver, for a white passenger to take the seat, and I was not sitting in the front of the bus, as so many people have said, and neither was my feet hurting, as many people have said. But I made up my mind that I would not give in any longer to legally-imposed racial segregation and of course my arrest brought about the protests for more than a year.

As I look back on those days, it’s just like a dream. The only thing that bothered me was that we waited so long to make this protest and to let it be known wherever we go that all of us should be free and equal and have all opportunities that others should have.

We still have a long way to go, we still have many obstacles and many challenges to face. It’s far from perfect, and it may never be, but I think as long as we do the best we can to improve conditions, then people will be benefited.

I try to not think of those things that we cannot control, but I think if we continue to work with positive attitudes, conditions will be better for more people.

We work with young people, from the ages of 11 to 17. Our main program is the Pathways to Freedom. And we’ll be going from Memphis, Tennessee through ten other states, and Washington, DC, and to Canada. It began July 13th and ends August 8th. We hope to take as many young people and their chaperons as possible throughout these areas, and stop and have workshops and programs. They’ll be traveling in buses, and we hope that will inspire and give them a sense of history and also to encourage them to be concerned about their self and history and motivated to reach their highest potential.

I would have to take longer than a minute to give my whole synopsis of my life, but I want to let you know that all of us should be free and equal and have equal opportunity and that is what I’m trying to instill and encourage and inspire young people to reach their highest potential.

There were so many needs for us to continue to work for freedom, because I didn’t think that we should have to be treated in the way we were, just for the sake of white supremacy, because it was designed to make them feel superior, and us feel inferior. That was the whole plan of racially enforced segregation.

My family, I would say, my mother, and my maternal grandparents. I grew up with them. My mother was a teacher in a little school, and she believed in freedom and equality for people, and did not have the notion that we were supposed to live as we did, under legally enforced racial segregation. She didn’t believe in it.

The advice I would give any young person is, first of all, to rid themselves of prejudice against other people and to be concerned about what they can do to help others. And of course, to get a good education, and take advantage of the opportunities that they have. In fact, there are more opportunities today than when I was young.