‘Strength from stillness’: Rosa Parks statue unveiled in US Capitol

More than half a century after she refused to give up her seat on an Alabama city bus, Rosa Parks has an immovable place in the U.S. Capitol — the first black woman to be honored with a statue there.

President Barack Obama and congressional leaders from both parties said at an unveiling Wednesday that the depiction was fitting: Parks is shown seated, hands clasped in front of her, eyes fixed forward.

“Rosa Parks’ singular act of disobedience launched a movement,” Obama said. “The tired feet of those who walked the dusty roads of Montgomery helped a nation see that to which it had once been blind.”

On Dec. 1, 1955, Parks, then a 42-year-old seamstress, broke the law by refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger on a packed bus. Her arrest touched off a yearlong boycott of the bus system, a turning point in the civil rights movement. In 1956, the Supreme Court banned segregation on public transportation.

Parks died in October 2005, at age 92, and would have turned 100 this month.

On Wednesday, Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., and the highest-ranking black member of Congress, called her “the first lady of civil rights, the mother of the movement, the saint of an endless struggle.”

The statue’s unveiling took place on a day when memories of the civil rights struggle were not far from mind in Washington. Across the street, with Clyburn watching, the Supreme Court heard arguments on whether provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 should stand. The act requires nine states, mostly in the South, to get federal permission to change voting rules. 

The statue of Parks, 9 feet tall and in bronze, will be in Statuary Hall, where the House of Representatives met in the early 1800s. It is part of a collection of 100 in five locations in the Capitol.

Among the others in Statuary Hall are William Jennings Bryan and Daniel Webster. House Speaker John Boehner pointed out that the statue of Parks will be “right in the gaze” of that of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy. He said her unassuming presence should inspire people to “draw strength from stillness.”

Parks was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1996 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 1999, but Rhea McCauley, a niece, told The Associated Press before the unveiling that this honor would be different.

“The medal, you could take it, put it on a mantel,” she said. “But her being in the hall itself is permanent.”

More than 50 of Parks’ relatives had planned to attend the ceremony, and two of them, a niece and a longtime friend, helped Obama and congressional leaders yank down the shroud that covered the statue.

The sculptor was Eugene Daub of San Pedro, Calif.

“She seemed to me a very — not shy, but modest. A very modest woman, and I wanted that to come through,” he told NBC News. “That she wasn’t ever looking for attention or celebrity, but she was just doing what she had to do.”

Obama said that Parks’ story is a reminder that “we so often spend our lives as if in a fog, accepting injustice, rationalizing inequity” — like the bus driver, he said, but also like the other passengers.

“Rosa Parks tells us there’s always something we can do,” he said.

Once there was a woman whose cells were immortal. What does this mean? Today, these cells have multiplied in laboratories worldwide to the point that, if you were to weigh all the cells that currently exist, they’d weigh about 50 million metric tons—about as much as 100 Empire State Buildings. So who was this woman, and why are scientists keeping her cells supplied with fresh nutrients so they can live on?

The woman was Henrietta Lacks, and her immortal cells—dubbed "HeLa"—have been essential in many of the great scientific discoveries of our time: curing polio; gene mapping; learning how cells work; developing drugs to treat cancer, herpes, leukemia, influenza, hemophilia, Parkinson’s disease, AIDS … and the list goes on and on (and on). If it deals with the human body and has been studied by scientists, odds are those scientists needed and used Lacks' cells somewhere along the way. HeLa cells were even sent up to space on an unmanned satellite to determine whether or not human tissue could survive in zero gravity.

Photo courtesy Amazon

Lacks was an impoverished black woman who died on October 4, 1951 of cervical cancer at just 31 years old. During her cancer treatment, a doctor at Johns Hopkins took a sample of her tumor without her knowledge or consent and sent it over to a colleague of his, Dr. George Gey, who had been trying for 20 years, unsuccessfully, to grow human tissues from cultures. A lab assistant there, Mary Kubicek, discovered that Henrietta’s cells, unlike normal human cells, could live and replicate outside the body.

Go to just about any cell culture lab in the world and you’ll find billions of HeLa cells stored there. In contrast to normal human cells, which will die after a few replications, Lacks' cells can live and replicate just fine outside of the human body (which is also unique among humans). Give her cells the nutrients they need to survive, and they will apparently live and replicate along forever, almost 60 years and counting since the first culture was taken. They can be frozen for literally decades and, when thawed, they'll go right on replicating.

Before her cells were discovered and widely cultured, it was nearly impossible for scientists to reliably experiment on human cells and get meaningful results. Cell cultures that scientists were studying would weaken and die very quickly outside the human body. Lacks' cells gave scientists, for the first time, a “standard” that they could use to test things on. HeLa cells can survive being shipped in the mail just fine, so scientists across the globe can use the same standard to test against.

Lacks died of uremic poisoning, in the segregated hospital ward for blacks, about 8 months after being diagnosed with cervical cancer, never knowing that her cells would become one of the most vital tools in modern medicine and would spawn a multi-billion dollar industry. She was survived by her husband and five children; the family lived in poverty for most of their lives, and didn't find out about the fate of Lacks' incredible cells until years later.

If you'd like to know more about Henrietta Lacks and her immortal cells, check out The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot.