Campus News

University will honor civil rights icon

The Office of Institutional Diversity will remember and honor the late civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks Feb. 6 from 3:30-5 p.m. in Reception Hall of the Tate Student Center.

The event, which comes two days after Parks’s birthday, consists of a celebration of her life and reflections by a panel of students on what Parks meant to them.

Parks was an African-American seamstress whose refusal to relinquish her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery, Ala., almost 50 years ago touched off the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

“We just hope it’s a way to mark that she was so significant,” says Martha Wisbey, assistant director of the Office of Institutional Diversity.

“We want to educate people who might not have any knowledge of who she was and also to have students who really do understand her impact share their perceptions. She propelled some very significant things that happened in our society,” Wisbey also says.