BY ANNE MICHAUD
The Cincinnati Enquirer
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Rosa Parks meets Heberle Elementary School students.
(Glenn Hartong photo)
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Rosa Parks does not need to say much to inspire people. Just being who she is, is enough.
The 300 children in the audience to welcome her to Cincinnati on Friday all knew her story. Many of the adults had heard her story as kids.
She is "a piece of history," said Michelle Orozco, a junior from Hamilton High School.
Mrs. Parks is in town to receive the first International Freedom Conductor Award from the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in a sold-out ceremony at the Westin Hotel tonight. She used her moments at the microphone midday Friday at the hotel to address the children.
"When you find you're being mistreated, in a quiet way -- not with fusses or fights -- in a quiet way, let them know when you're being treated wrong," said the 85-year-old woman who, in 1955, refused to be segregated to the back of the bus.
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Mrs. Parks looks at bus seat similar to the one she refused to give up 45 years ago.
(Glenn Hartong photo)
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She was arrested, and the resulting bus boycott and U.S. Supreme Court decision helped propel the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to prominence and ended legal segregation in Montgomery, Ala.
"We hope you will stay in school, take good care of yourselves, get good grades," Mrs. Parks continued. "As you come into your adulthood, you will be well-educated, well-mannered and do all you should to make life better for yourselves and other people."
Frail and small, Mrs. Parks spoke so softly that Ed Rigaud, president and CEO of the Freedom Center, held the microphone up to her mouth. She wished the budding organization a great future.
Mrs. Parks inspires people because she was an ordinary woman who showed dignity and courage, qualities we all can aspire to, said Patricia Ellis, a teacher of African-American Studies and American History at Hamilton High School.
Ms. Ellis and four other teachers invited students to write about Mrs. Parks for an essay contest. Fifty of the 200 essayists -- juniors and seniors -- attended Friday's ceremony dressed in matching Rosa Parks T-shirts. The top 10 winners have been invited to the black tie award ceremony tonight.
Ms. Ellis spent 10 days with Mrs. Parks on the Pathways to Freedom tour one summer, a program of the Detroit-based Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development. Pathways is a bus tour, a "freedom ride" tracing American history from the Underground Railroad to the civil rights movement.
"She's very humble," Ms. Ellis said of Mrs. Parks. "She understands she has contributed to history. More than that, she understands she was just a vessel being used."
The high school essayists have absorbed Mrs. Parks' message of dignity without violence.
"The beauty to Rosa Parks' gentle refusal to give up her seat is just that, it was gentle," wrote first-place winner Leesa Gresham. "She did not do it because she hated white people. . . . She refused to continue to bow down to laws that humiliated and degraded people."
Another of the top 10 writers said Mrs. Parks inspired hope. "This woman is someone that I see as a role model for all of those people who think that their situation is unchangeable," wrote Suzanne Laino, a senior. "She showed how just one action, the action of standing strong for what you know is right, could make such a powerful impact."
Renee Ray, another winning essayist, pointed out that Mrs. Parks' courageous moment resulted from nearly 20 years of work for equal rights. It was a deliberate act.
"Long before that day, she fought segregation in her own way," Ms. Ray wrote. "She walked up the stairs of a building rather than riding in an elevator marked "blacks only.' She went home thirsty instead of drinking from the "colored only' water fountain."
Students from several other schools attended Friday's ceremony, including The Blessed Sacrament, Cincinnati Junior Academy, Heberle Elementary School, Hughes High School, Taft High School, College Hill Academy and Northern Kentucky University.
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