When UCLA alumnus Willy Leventhal met Rosa Parks in the
mid-1970s, he found that she matched the description he had always
heard.
“She was a very quiet-spoken person, a very dignified
person,” Leventhal said, speaking on his cell phone from the
Rosa Parks Library and Museum at Troy University in Alabama.
He said the library was busy with news crews, families and
others who came to honor Parks, the civil rights leader famous for
her refusal to sit at the back of a bus.
Parks died in her home Monday evening at the age of 92.
Almost 50 years ago, in December of 1955 in Montgomery, Ala.,
Parks refused to leave her seat in the front of a bus, a place that
was reserved for white people in the 1950s South.
“What Mrs. Parks did was to give a human witness to the
concept of equal treatment, within a year of the 1954 Brown v.
Board (of Education) case,” which outlawed segregation, said
Rick Tuttle, a UCLA alumnus and current executive director of the
Dashew Center. Tuttle was active in the civil rights movement
during his time at UCLA in the 1960s.
Parks’ message was a broad one that she would continue to
restate throughout her life.
“As long as there is unemployment, war, crime and all
things that go to the infliction of man’s inhumanity to man,
regardless ““ there is much to be done, and people need to
work together,” she once said.
Her action is seen by many as a historical marker.
“In many ways, history is marked as before and after Rosa
Parks. She sat down in order that we all might stand up, and the
walls of segregation came down. Paradoxically, her imprisonment
opened the doors to our long journey to freedom … She wove glory
with grace,” the Rev. Jesse Jackson said in a statement
Monday night.
In keeping her seat after being told to give the spot to a white
passenger, Parks sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which led to a
court ruling that desegregated bus systems, and caused far-reaching
ripple effects.
“It triggered action in Montgomery and it spread across
the country,” Tuttle said. Parks is attributed with kicking
off the civil rights movement and inspiring such leaders as Martin
Luther King, Jr., and thousands of others, to act.
“She came along like a burst of lightning,” Tuttle
said.
He quickly rephrased himself, saying she was more than a
lightning bolt ““ she was a “ray of sunshine,” he
said.
From across the country, Tuttle watched news coverage of the bus
boycott, and found the events compelling even as a child.
“I was very moved by it, by the Montgomery Bus
Boycott,” he said. “She became the emblem of someone
who believed deeply in the 14th amendment (to) the Constitution,
which is equal protection.”
Parks was last at UCLA for a book reading of Ralph
Ellison’s “Invisible Man,” a 1952 novel that
addresses the black community’s lack of power and voice in
the country at the time.
Upon her arrival at the reading, Parks received a standing
ovation and the audience of about 150 were “stunned and
delighted” at her appearance, according to a Daily Bruin
article from May 18, 1998.
Tuttle was too young in 1955 to assume an active role in the
civil rights movement immediately following the Montgomery Bus
Boycott, but years later he would join other students who were
similarly motivated by Parks’ example.
Leventhal said her action demonstrates how much power a single
person can have.
Often people ask, “What can one person do? Why should we
try?” Leventhal said. “Rosa Parks tried.”
Prior to Parks’ refusal to leave her seat on the bus,
blacks in the South had by and large accepted the policy that
reserved front seats for whites.
Even years later, in the summer of 1965, Leventhal described a
feeling of hopelessness that he saw among blacks in Macon, Georgia,
in their attitudes toward the opportunities to register to vote and
participate in elections.
“We have much trouble with apathy from many Negroes. When
a man has not voted for 40 years it is sometimes very difficult to
convince him that he should,” Leventhal wrote in a letter to
the Daily Bruin on July 23, 1965.
The decision to go to Macon in 1965 and put himself in the
middle of the volatile atmosphere that permeated the South at the
time gave Leventhal cause for apprehension ““ but not enough
to prevent him from going.
“The only thing … stopping me was fear,” Leventhal
said. “It was either let my fear paralyze me, or say
“˜Yeah, this is … something someone should
do.'”
Along with other students from the Bruin Summer Community
Organization and Political Education, Leventhal participated in
voter registration drives and integration campaigns.
With reports from Bruin wire services.