Top Idaho lawmaker botches civil rights history
The No. 3 Republican leader in the Idaho House says he made a "slight mistake" when he described Rosa Parks as a champion of states' rights.
"One little lady got tired of the federal government telling her what to do," Assistant Majority Leader Brent Crane of Nampa said during Wednesday's debate on Gov. Butch Otter's bill establishing a state-run health insurance exchange. "I've reached that point, Mr. Speaker, that I'm tired of giving in to the federal government."
In fact, Parks' arrest for violating a local law by refusing to give up her seat on a segregated Montgomery, Ala., bus in 1955 sparked the civil rights movement, which ultimately ended a century of state-enforced racial discrimination in "Jim Crow" laws.
The movement reached its climax in the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act when the U.S. Congress overcame full-throated Southern cries of "states' rights."
Read more here: http://www.idahostatesman.com/2013/03/15/2492347/top-idaho-lawmaker-botches-civil.html#storylink=cpy
