Buses liberated on Rosa Parks Day

Dec. 1 is Rosa Parks Day. In Rhode Island this year, it was officially Rosa Parks Day, and everyone rode public transportation for free in honor of the Civil Rights hero, who died in 2005 at the age of 92.

Members of Rosa Parks Human Rights Day Committee, Providence, Dec. 1. WW photo: Ed Childs

What brought this people’s victory to the smallest state was a concerted public campaign that started two years ago. The local Rosa Parks Human Rights Day Committee had aimed at the 2005 date—the 50th anniversary of the day Parks refused to give up her seat on the Birmingham, Ala., bus to a white man and launched the struggle that won equality on that city’s transit system.

In Providence, as well as in New York, Boston and other cities that year, local committees demanded and got city councils to pass resolutions declaring Dec. 1 “Rosa Parks Human Rights Day.”

In 2006 in Rhode Island, the House passed the resolution, which the Senate signed in 2007. This not only made Rhode Island the first state to honor Parks Day, but the resolution urged free transportation on the Rhode Island Public Transit Authority (RIPTA) buses.

This year the RIPTA board acted on the resolution and declared the bus rides free. Local activists say they will continue the struggle to ensure that the practice is made permanent.

Providence’s Rosa Parks Human Rights Day Committee, which organized the struggle and which has held commemorations in December each year since 2005, this year conducted a community activists’ conference on Dec. 1 on the State of Human Rights in Rhode Island. More than 60 people, mostly from the African-American community, attended the conference.

The event discussed strategies for fighting back against massive looming state budget cuts, including building for a march on the State House in Providence on April 4, 2008, the anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the 40th anniversary of the Poor Peoples Campaign.

During the meeting, activists spoke on prisons, environmental racism and hunger in Rhode Island, showing how much had to be done. The number of people in prison in the state has increased by 700 percent in the last 20 years. The rate of incarceration for Black males is eight times that of white males.

Environmental racism feeds directly into the track to school absence and jail. Lead-paint poisoning and asthma from rats, roaches and pollution are the leading causes of school absence. Schools are built on top of toxic waste sites.

Hunger is also on the rise. According to the census bureau, 48,000 people were hungry during the year and 16,000 were hungry regularly during 2004-2006, up by 3,000 in each category from 2001-2003. And Rhode Island is cutting back on food stamp workers.

In the discussion on these points, community activist Asata Tigrai pointed out that these drastic conditions must all be traced back to capitalism and to money that is going to kill people in Iraq.

Everett Muhammad of the Nation of Islam chaired the conference and spoke on Rosa Parks’ legacy.

Jasmine Woodbury, youth organizer for DARE youth, described the program to train youths as organizers and activists, including teaching political terms, public speaking, media and information on great civil rights leaders like Rosa Parks. She described the community organizing project that got the school disciplinary code revised to reduce the number of suspensions and involves the community and youth themselves in monitoring how the schools apply the revised code.

Lisa Reels read Leonard Peltier’s statement to the 2007 National Day of Mourning march in Plymouth, Mass. Everyone at the conference gave a rousing round of applause to Billy Kennedy, a retired steelworker who is a member of the RIPTA board and fought tirelessly to have the free fare on Rosa Parks Day adopted. State Senator Howard Metts spoke on opposing hospital mergers. Robert Parham read poetry from both Langston Hughes and the Lost Poets.

Larry Woodbury, a youth coordinator with the Rosa Parks Human Rights Day committee and member of Fight Imperialism, Stand Together (FIST), presented a verse, saying in part, “The people got to unite as our future isn’t so great as the rich keep getting richer, slavery is in sight. They got our youth in the prisons, African Americans in jails. It cost $68,000 to free Michael Bell. And our houses are for sale, the banks is buying them out. I’m starting to think the rich want us to move down South. Sometimes I think about Ms. Parks to shut my mouth and ease my pain. Nonviolence, I’ll try those things. But there still remains that line you cannot pass. Keep killing our youth and watch City Hall go up in a flash.”