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1. Presidential Medal of Freedom

2. Congressional Gold Medal

3. Spingarn Medal

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The Smithsonian's National Museum of American History will collect the Congressional Gold Medal, the nation's highest civilian award, presented in recognition of the service and gallantry of Filipino Veterans of World War II during a ceremony on Capitol Hill Oct. 25.

The medal was made pursuant to the provisions of the Filipino Veterans of World War II Congressional Gold Medal Act of 2015, Public Law 265 (114th Congress), which was sponsored by Sen. Mazie Hirono and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard to recognize the 260,000 Filipino, Filipino American and American soldiers who served during WWII in defense of the United States and the Philippines.

More than 57,000 were killed and thousands more wounded or went missing while defending the Philippines, at that time a U.S. commonwealth.

The medal, created by the U.S. Mint, features faces of soldiers and guerillas on the obverse, representing a Filipino scout, a Filipino infantry regiment officer and a guerrilla soldier in period uniforms, headgear and weapons. The reverse highlights the theme "Duty to Country" with a scroll bearing the years of 1941, 1945 and 1946 to denote three key phases of WWII service, as well as the four major campaigns: Bataan and Corregidor, Luzon, Leyte and Southern Philippines. The medal was designed by Joel Iskowitz and Donna Weaver and sculpted by Phebe Hemphill and Joseph Menna of the U.S. Mint.

The dates on the scroll memorize the 1941 Japanese attack of the Philippines, the 1945 liberation of the Philippines and defeat of Japanese Imperial Force, and the 1946 passage of the Rescission Act by Congress that denied citizenship and revoked veterans benefits and payments to Filipino soldiers.

The Congressional Gold Medal has been awarded by the U.S. Congress throughout American history to recipients who have contributed significantly to American society. Recipients of the Congressional Gold Medal must be supported by two-thirds of the House of Representatives, 67 members of the Senate and must pass specific standards when being considered.

Several Smithsonian museums preserve Congressional Gold Medals. The National Air and Space Museum holds the medals awarded to the Tuskegee Airmen and the Women Airforce Service Pilots. The National Museum of African American History and Culture holds the Montfort Point Marines medal, awarded to the African American Marines who served during WWII. The Congressional Gold medal awarded to the "Monuments Men" went to the Archives of American Art. The medal presented to the Native American Code Talkers is preserved at the National Museum of the American Indian. The National Museum of American History collected the Nisei Japanese American soldier medal in 2011 and the Borinqueneer medal presented to Puerto Rico's 65th Infantry Regiment in 2016.

Through incomparable collections, rigorous research and dynamic public outreach, the National Museum of American History explores the infinite richness and complexity of American history. It helps people understand the past in order to make sense of the present and shape a more humane future. The museum is located on Constitution Avenue N.W., between 12th and 14th streets, and is open daily from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. (closed Dec. 25). Admission is free. For more information, visit http://americanhistory.si.edu. For Smithsonian information, the public may call (202) 633-1000.

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Smithsonian Collects Filipino Congressional Gold Medal

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The Smithsonian's National Museum of American History will collect the Congressional Gold Medal, the nation's highest civilian award, presented in recognition of the service and gallantry of Filipino Veterans of World War II during a ceremony on Capitol Hill Oct. 25.

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Where did Rosa Parks go to school as a child

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Where did Rosa Parks go to school as a child

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Rosa's mother wanted her to get a high school education, but this wasn't easy for an African-American girl living in Alabama in the 1920s. After finishing up elementary school at Pin e Level she attended the Montgomery Industrial School for Girls.

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But a cache of Parks' papers at the Library of Congress portrays a battle-tested activist who had been steeped in the struggle against white violence since childhood.

The trove, parts of which were unknown to historians, also shows Parks as a woman devoted to her family, especially to her mother and husband, Raymond, for whom she kept her hair in long braids even after he died.

Parks died in Detroit in 2005 at the age of 92, famous for a solitary act of defiance that helped launch the modern civil rights movement and etched her name in the annals of history.

The artefacts at the Library of Congress include Parks' tiny Bible, a snapshot of the Tuskegee, Alabama, house where she was born in 1913, and letters to her mother, Leona, and her husband.

A photograph of Rosa Parks' husband, Raymond Parks, from the Library of Congress exhibition. Credit:Matt McClain/Washington Post

"Parks, my dear husband," she wrote to him in 1957, while she was working in Virginia and he was at home in Alabama. "I miss you so very much and wish you were here."

During an earlier absence, in 1956, her mother wrote her that she was fine, "but Parks is about as usual when you are away".

Maricia Battle, curator with the prints and photographs division of the Library of Congress, holds a photo of Rosa Parks from the exhibition. Credit:Matt McClain/Washington Post

There are little-known photos of her husband, who was also an activist and who quietly supported her and weathered death threats as she travelled the country. One shot of him is a wallet-sized photo she cropped to carry around with her.

There are other photos - of her father, who deserted the family when she was a toddler, and of several unidentified people.

Civil rights attorney Fred Gray speaks during the unveiling of a historical marker in his honour on Dexter Avenue in Montgomery, Alabama, on Wednesday, February 4. Gray represented Rosa Parks during the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Credit:AP

One is an old postmortem photo of an elderly man in a coffin. And there are pages and pages of writing that record her thoughts about the plight of African-Americans, bits of her biography and prayers.

She wrote on anything she could find: the back of a utility company envelope, the back of a civic program, the front and back of a church program, pages torn from a notebook, the stationery of a department store that fired her.

"These were the things she was not able to part with," said Maricia Battle, a curator of photography at the library. "These are the things that were most dear to her."

"It's family," Battle said. "It's her husband." She never remarried after he died in 1977. They had no children.

"Raymond was the love of her life," Battle said. "You can just see it when you go through and look at the images here. It's just wonderful."

Battle said she had never seen a picture of Raymond Parks before. Along with the wallet photo, the collection includes an image of the couple sitting together at an NAACP dinner in the early 1950s.

Much of the material dates from the time before Rosa Parks became famous.

One fragment, perhaps a draft of a letter, is written on the stationery of Montgomery Fair, the department store where she had worked. She speaks of the 1955 murder of the black teenager Emmett Till, who was killed in Mississippi after allegedly flirting with a white woman.

"This case could be multiplied many times in the South," she wrote in pencil. "In my lifetime I have known Negroes who were killed by whites, without any arrests or investigations . . . It is the custom to keep such things covered up."

The collection also illustrates the financial impact of her bus action. "She loses her job," said Margaret McAleer, senior archives specialist. "Her husband loses his job. They were poor, working class to begin with. They descend into deep, deep poverty."

Another intriguing fragment is the brief undated biographical sketch, written on a few pages torn from a notebook. In it, she tells of the Klan menace in her rural community of Pine Level, Alabama.

"KKK moved through the country, burning negro churches, schools, flogging and killing," she wrote. Her grandfather, who was tall, thin and "very caucasian in appearance", had long white hair that she loved to comb.

"He would stay up to wait for (the Klansmen) to come to our house," she wrote. "He kept his shotgun within hand reach at all times . . . The doors and windows were boarded and nailed tight from the inside. I stayed awake nights keeping vigil with grandpa."

Adrienne Cannon, an African-American history and culture specialist at the library, said parts of the handwritten sketch do not appear in her published autobiography, Rosa Parks: My Story.

The book is Parks' "public image," Cannon said.

The sketch is "Rosa with her hair down", she said. "She's 6 years old . . . waiting for grandpa to kill a Ku-Kluxer. This is the real deal. This tells you how she had the strength and determination to do what she did."

Parks became famous on December 1, 1955, when she boarded a public bus in Montgomery on her way home from work and refused to move from a seat to allow whites to sit. What followed was the historic 380-day black boycott of Montgomery buses, a US Supreme Court decision desegregating the city's public transportation, and the modern civil rights movement. But Parks, in a way, was trapped by history - "frozen in the bus seat", Battle said.

She was the heroic, fed-up seamstress. "It seemed like her life started and stopped with the bus," Battle said.

But that was not the case. "She didn't stop there," Battle said. "She continued. She worked with organisations. She started her own institute to honour her late husband. She worked with kids all over the world."

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'I wanted to see him kill a Ku-Kluxer': Artifacts show a Rosa Parks steeped in freedom struggle from childhood

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But a cache of Parks' papers at the Library of Congress portrays a battle-tested activist who had been steeped in the struggle against white violence since childhood. The trove, parts of which were unknown to historians, also shows Parks as a woman devoted to her family, especially to her mother and husband, Raymond, for whom she kept her hair in long braids even after he died.

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She moved with her parents, James and Leona McCauley, to Pine Level, Alabama, at age 2 to reside with Leona's parents. Her brother, Sylvester, was born in 1915, and shortly after that her parents separated.

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On December 1, 1955, after a long day's work at a Montgomery department store, where she worked as a seamstress, Rosa Parks boarded the Cleveland Avenue bus for home. She took a seat in the first of several rows designated for "colored" passengers

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Read CNN's Fast Facts about Rosa Parks, considered the mother of the civil rights movement.

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Rosa Louise McCauley Parks was an activist in the civil rights movement best known for her pivotal role in the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The United States Congress has called her "the first lady of civil rights" and "the mother of the freedom movement

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No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.

Each person must live their life as a model for others.

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All Epic Motivational Videos Inspirational Stories Inspiring Movie Scenes Inspiring Speeches and Interviews Motivational Quotes

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She died October 24, 2005

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Rosa park was born in February 4,191

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Sixty years ago, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Ala. Her courageous act is now American legend. She is a staple of elementary school curricula and was the second-most popular historical figure named by American students in a survey. When Republican presidential contenders were asked to pick a woman they wanted pictured on the $10 bill, the largest number of votes went to Parks.

Americans are convinced they know this civil rights hero. In textbooks and documentaries, she is the meek seamstress gazing quietly out of a bus window - a symbol of progress and how far we've come. When she died in 2005, the word "quiet" was used in most of her obituaries and eulogies. We have grown comfortable with the Parks who is often seen but rarely heard.

That image of Parks has stripped her of political substance. Her "life history of being rebellious," as she put it, comes through decisively in the recently opened Rosa Parks Collection at the Library of Congress. It features previously unseen personal writings, letters, speech notes, financial and medical records, political documents, and decades of photographs.

There, we see a lifelong activist who had been challenging white supremacy for decades before she became the famous catalyst for the Montgomery bus boycott. We see a woman who, from her youth, didn't hesitate to indict the system of oppression around her. As she once wrote, "I talked and talked of everything I know about the white man's inhuman treatment of the negro."

Parks was a seasoned freedom fighter who had grown up in a family that supported Marcus Garvey and who married an activist for the Scottsboro boys. She joined the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP in 1943, becoming branch secretary. She spent the next decade pushing for voter registration, seeking justice for black victims of white brutality and sexual violence, supporting wrongfully accused black men, and pressing for desegregation of schools and public spaces. Committed to both the power of organized nonviolent direct action and the moral right of self defense, she called Malcolm X her personal hero.

The Rosa Parks Collection, which opened in February, reveals how broadly Parks has been distorted and misunderstood. Her papers languished unseen for years following her death because of disputes over her estate, the hefty price the auction house put on the archives, and its refusal to allow any scholars to assess the papers before the sale. Last year, the Howard Buffett Foundation bought the archive and gave it to the Library of Congress on 10-year loan.

Though Parks later wrote an autobiography, her notes from decades earlier give a more personal sense of her thoughts. In numerous accounts, she highlighted the difficulty of navigating a segregated society and the immense pressure put on black people not to dissent. She wrote that it took a "major mental acrobatic feat" to survive as a black person in the United States. Highlighting that it was "not easy to remain rational and normal mentally in such a setting," she refused to normalize the ability to function under American racism.

For her, the frustration began in childhood, when even her beloved grandmother worried about her "talking biggety to white folks." She recounts how her grandmother grew angry when a young Rosa recounted picking up a brick to challenge a white bully. Rosa told her grandmother: "I would rather be lynched than live to be mistreated and not be allowed to say `I don't like it.' "

Parks viewed the power of speaking back in the face of racism and oppression as fundamental - and saw that denying that right was key to the functioning of white power. Parks's "determination never to accept it, even if it must be endured," led her to "search for a way of working for freedom and first class citizenship."

Parks carried that determination into adulthood, though she made clear the impossible mental state it required. She lyrically described the difficulty of being a rebel, the ways black children were "conditioned early to learn their places," and the toll it took on her personally: "There is just so much hurt, disappointment and oppression one can take.. The line between reason and madness grows thinner."

In the longest piece of the collection, an 11-page document describing a near-rape incident, Parks decisively uses the power of speaking back. When the document became public in 2011, there was controversy around its release and questions about whether it was a work of fiction. But it does not appear that Parks wrote fiction, and details of the story correspond to Parks's life. Like the narrator of the story, Parks was doing domestic work during the Scottsboro trial, during her late teens in 1931. It's written in the first person, though the narrator is unnamed.

In the account, a young Rosa is threatened with assault by a white neighbor of her employer, who was let into the house by a black worker, "Sam." The heavy-set white man she aptly called "Mr. Charlie" (a term black people of the era used for white people and their arbitrary power) gets a drink, puts his hand on her waist, and attempts to make a move on her.

Furious and terrified, she resolved to resist: "I was ready and willing to die, but give any consent, never, never, never." When Mr. Charlie said he'd gotten permission from Sam to be with her, she replied that Sam didn't own her, that she hated the both of them, and that nothing Mr. Charlie could do would get her consent. "If he wanted to kill me and rape a dead body," Parks wrote, "he was welcome but he would have to kill me first."

It is significant that Parks's philosophy of resistance is framed through an experience of sexual aggression. She was committed to women's rights throughout her life - from working to get justice for black women who had been raped, such as Gertrude Perkins and Recy Taylor, to defending the rights of women prisoners. When Joan Little, a 20-year-old black woman serving a seven-year sentence for robbery, killed a white guard who sexually assaulted her, Parks co-founded Detroit's Joan Little Defense Committee. Little was acquitted, becoming the first woman in U.S. history to successfully use self-defense against sexual assault in a homicide case.

Parks used this power of speaking back again on the evening of Dec. 1, 1955, when bus driver James Blake ordered her to give up her seat to a white passenger and she refused. Blake chose not simply to evict her from the bus, as he had done in the past, but to have her arrested. Calling attention to the larger power in the system, Parks questioned the arresting officers, "Why do you push us around?" One officer answered, "I don't know, but the law is the law and you're under arrest."

After years of activism, Parks had reached her breaking point on the bus that December evening: "I had been pushed around all my life and felt at this moment that I couldn't take it any more." Her writings reveal the burden that this decade of political activism - which, with a small cadre of other Montgomery NAACP members, had produced little change - had been on her spirit. Describing the "dark closet of my mind," she wrote about the loneliness of being a rebel: "I am nothing. I belong nowhere."

Repeatedly in her writings, Parks underscored the difficulties in mobilizing in the years before her bus protest: "People blamed [the] NAACP for not winning cases when they did not support it and give strength enough." She found it demoralizing, if understandable, that in the decade before the boycott, "the masses seemed not to put forth too much effort to struggle against the status quo," noting how those who challenged the racial order like she did were labeled "radicals, sore heads, agitators, trouble makers." Indeed, Rosa Parks was red-baited and received death threats and hate mail for years in Montgomery and in Detroit for her movement work.

Though the righteousness of her actions may seem self-evident today, at the time, those who challenged segregation - like those who challenge racial injustice today - were often treated as unstable, unruly and potentially dangerous by many white people and some black people. Her writings show how she struggled with feeling isolated and crazy, before and even during the boycott. In one piece of writing, she explained how she felt "completely alone and desolate as if I was descending in a black and bottomless chasm."

Despite the boycott's successful end, the Parks family still faced death threats and could not find steady work. In August 1957, they left Montgomery for Detroit, where her brother and cousins lived - "the promised land that wasn't," as she called it. There, in Detroit, she remained active in various movements for racial, social, criminal and global justice in the decades to come. Mountains of fliers, programs, letters, mailings, meeting agendas and conference programs document the span of her political activism there - though very few writings have survived in her personal papers from these later years.

The few that remain tell us that her radicalism never weakened. "Freedom fighters never retire," she noted in a testimonial for a fellow activist. As she had for decades, Parks drew sustenance from the militancy and spirit of young people, working in and alongside the growing Black Power movement. Understanding the impact that years of activism with limited results can have on a person, she continued calling for rapid and radical change. In a 1973 letter posted at the Afro-American Museum in Detroit, she noted the impact that years of white violence and intransigence had on the younger generation:

The attempt to solve our racial problems nonviolently was discredited in the eyes of many by the hard core segregationists who met peaceful demonstrations with countless acts of violence and bloodshed. Time is running out for a peaceful solution. It may even be too late to save our society from total destruction.

Writing this after what many mark as the successful end of the modern civil rights movement, Parks clearly believed that the struggle was not over. In the 1970s, '80s and '90s, she continued to press for change in the criminal justice system, in school and housing inequality, in jobs and welfare policy and in foreign policy. She worked in U.S. Rep. John Conyers's office and spoke out against Clarence Thomas's nomination to the Supreme Court, dismayed by his poor record on civil rights. Sometime in the 1990s, an older Parks doodled on a paper bag (preserved in the collection): "The Struggle Continues.. The Struggle Continues.. The Struggle Continues."

Much of the memorializing of the Montgomery bus boycott and the civil rights movement misses this side of Parks. Instead, we've become content to celebrate her "quiet" bus protest as a historic triumph in a movement that has long since run its course. But listening to Rosa Parks forces us to reconsider our view not only of our civil rights history, but also the demands of our civil rights present. We are forced to reckon with the fact that today's rebels could be tomorrow's heroes.

[ Jeanne Theoharis is a distinguished professor of political science at the Brooklyn College of the City University of New York and author of the award-winning " The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks."]

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February 4 - Rosa Parks Birthday; How History Got the Rosa Parks Story Wrong

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Sixty years ago, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Ala. Her courageous act is now American legend. She is a staple of elementary school curricula and was the second-most popular historical figure named by American students in a survey.

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Rosa park lived and Detroit &Tuskegee, Alabama

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Civil rights icon Rosa Parks is known for her actions on a bus in Alabama, but somehow her house ended up in Berlin. Now, it is coming home.

In 2016, the American artist Ryan Mendoza discovered the house Parks occupied in Detroit. Its was falling apart and under foreclosure. Mendoza purchased the small wood frame house, backed it up and shipped it to Berlin, where it became part of an art exhibit in his garden. Now, the New York Times, reports that the Nash Family Foundation, a Minneapolis-based charity, has agreed to pay for its passage back to the states.

"I never wanted to rebuild it in my backyard," Mendoza told the Times. "But I wanted to protect it...It's time for the house to return home. It's needed for people to have another major point of reference for how to treat each other with dignity. This will be a marker on the ground."

While the historic house may have a ticket home, its final resting place is up for debate. Institutions including Brown University, the Museum of Modern Art, the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit and the Brooklyn Museum, among others have all been queried.

"The house has a symbolic importance - it's important in the narrative of her life," said James Nash, a board member behind the foundation's pledge. "She suffered for a huge act of courage. It should be here, not in Berlin."

But Mendoza says he has at least one good idea for where the house should go.

"Should this house go on the lawn of the White House for all time?" Mendoza asked. "Yes, why don't we start with the house that was built by the slaves of this country." [NYT] - Christopher Cameron

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Rosa Parks house was almost lost, now it's coming home

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Civil rights icon Rosa Parks is known for her actions on a bus in Alabama, but somehow her house ended up in Berlin. Now, it is coming home. In 2016, the American artist Ryan Mendoza discovered the house Parks occupied in Detroit. Its was falling apart and under foreclosure.

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Rosa park was the first black women to set and the front of the bus