Greensboro Sit-Ins: Launch of a Civil Rights Movement

NRinteractive
updated 2004

Woolworth's Museum to Honor Rosa Parks
Thursday, January 26, 1995
By LORRAINE AHEARN, Staff Writer

The woman whose dignity sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott - and the modern civil rights movement - will be honored next week in Greensboro by the organizers of the Woolworth's museum.

Rosa Parks, the 81-year-old woman who became the mother of the civil rights movement by refusing to step to the back of the bus, will attend Wednesday morning's memorial at the Elm Street lunch counter. She will also be the first recipient of the new Alston-Jones

International Civil and Human Rights Award at a banquet Feb. 1 at 7:30 p.m.

The banquet, sponsored by the Sit-In Movement Inc., is to raise money for the International Civil Rights Museum planned at the site of the historic 1960 Woolworth's sit-in. Parks, today a Detroit resident, will be here Tuesday to promote her new book Quiet Strength.

"We just want to pay homage to her for all the struggles she went through for the civil rights movement," said Guilford County Commissioner Melvin "Skip" Alston, foundation director. "Just by sitting down, she and the A&T students here in Greensboro shook the nation."