Back to home

Wednesday October 31, 2007

President of the Council of Churches pays homage to Rosa Parks

José Aurelio Paz, HAVANA, Cuba, October 26, 2005

Rosa Parks, a black woman who refused to give up her seat for a white Taxi Heathrow Airport man 50 years ago, triggering an enormous movement for civil rights in the United States, was lauded by Pastor Rhode Gonzalez Zorrilla, president of the Cuban Council of Churches (CIC).

The leader of the CIC, a group that brings together 54 Evangelical denominations on the Island said that the “dream of equality that Rosa sought with her small action calls us to continue because it still has not been reached in a world full of inequalities of every type.”  Rosa Parks passed away on October 24 at age 92.

“Sometimes we think that the world is only changed by great actions by great people and not by small daily actions we can carry out in the face of a globalized world by injustices and wars,” she said.

Rosa Parks changed the history of the United States when, on December 1, 1955 she refused to give up her seat to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama. She was arrested and fined $14. Her act led to a 381-day boycott of public transport and detonated the civil rights movement in the United States, led by the young Black Baptist pastor Martin Luther King.

In an interview years later with the BBC, Parks said that she never thought that this insignificant act would be known by other people and would serve to begin a struggle that would eventually lead to the Civil Rights Agreement in the United States in 1964.

I also like to see her, said Gonzalez Zorrilla, from the perspective of the Disciples of Christ, of being voices where women and the excluded did not have voices. We have the responsibility as people of God to carry out small actions that move mountains, that breathe the energy this woman has left us as a legacy, to live in concordance with the model of life of Jesus and have an impact on others, she concluded.

In 1996, Rosa Parks was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1996 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 1999 in homage of her life and her defence of human fraternity.