"Rosa Parks Sat...."
Fields is credited with the original version of a quotation that became popular following Barack Obama's victory in the 2008 presidential election. At the "State of the Black Union 2008" symposium in New Orleans, Louisiana in February 2008, Fields said, "Rosa Parks sat down so we could stand up. Martin Luther King marched so Jesse Jackson could run. Jesse Jackson ran so Obama could win." Another version has Fields saying, "W. E. B. Du Bois taught so that Rosa Parks could take a seat. Rosa took a seat so we all could take a stand. We all took a stand so that Martin Luther King Jr. could march. Martin marched so Jesse Jackson could run. Jesse ran so Obama could WIN." Fields's statement was shortened by the rapper Jay-Z in "My President Is Black": "Rosa Parks sat so Martin Luther could walk/ Martin Luther walked so Barack Obama could run/ Barack Obama ran so all the children could fly."
Read more about this topic: Cleo Fields
Famous quotes containing the words rosa parks, rosa, parks and/or sat:
“If Rosa Parks had taken a poll before she sat down in that bus in Montgomery, she’d still be standing.”
—Mary Frances Berry (b. 1938)
“We are all dead men on leave.”
—Eugene Leviné, Russian Jew, friend of Rosa Luxemburg’s lover, Jogiches. quoted in Men in Dark Times, “Rosa Luxemburg: 1871-1919,” sct. 3, Hannah Arendt (1968)
“Perhaps our own woods and fields,—in the best wooded towns, where we need not quarrel about the huckleberries,—with the primitive swamps scattered here and there in their midst, but not prevailing over them, are the perfection of parks and groves, gardens, arbors, paths, vistas, and landscapes. They are the natural consequence of what art and refinement we as a people have.... Or, I would rather say, such were our groves twenty years ago.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“He sat in a wheeled chair, waiting for dark,
And shivered in his ghastly suit of grey,
Legless, sewn short at elbow.”
—Wilfred Owen (1893–1918)