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JOHN NIELSEN, host:
President Clinton will award civil rights activist Rosa Parks the Congressional Gold Medal this Tuesday, and in tomorrow's issue of Time magazine, Parks is listed as one of the 20 most important people of this century. Historian Douglas Brinkley says that's no surprise.
MR. DOUGLAS BRINKLEY (HISTORIAN):
For all the controversy she sparked 44 years ago, these days everybody seems to love the 86-year-old Mrs. Rosa Parks, who made history on December 1st, 1955, when she was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, for refusing to give up her seat on the Cleveland Avenue bus to a white man. Her courageous act touched off a 381-day bus boycott led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the passive revolution that changed the nation.
Since then, the civil rights matriarch has become America's Mother Teresa, a national saint, an unimpeachable hero even in a cynical age. Every year scads of streets and public schools and towns across the country are renamed in her honor, including 12th Street in her adopted hometown of Detroit. But like so many cultural icons, Rosa Parks is shrouded...