Wr4jeZ First of all, there’s no one else like YOU—your story is unique and you can tell about people, times, and places that only YOU can share.

Why not tell your grandchildren about you….plus their grandparents, great-grandparents, and even their great-great grandparents (that’s

your grandparents)! It’s really about creating a loving, lasting bond—preserving not just life stories, but relationships, for

generations to come.

Of course, you can also give them your own advice about love, work, and how to lead a good life. Here was my grandma’s advice to me: “Be

what you want. If you do something, do it the best you can.” Because it’s my grandma, it means so much more. I’ll always be able to

remember what she said because it was actually written down. What’s your advice for your family? This is your opportunity to write it

down.

Reminiscing is good for you too! Over 100 studies over the last 10 years have found that reminiscing lowers depression, alleviates

physical symptoms (arthritis, asthma), and stimulates the hippocampus where memories are stored in the brain. So consider the great

health reasons for reminiscing too.

X1tG5p First there is the need to find the real meaning life has for you. This journey we are all on is a varied one, for sure, but there are some similar things we are all going through.

Each of us, in our search for meaning in life, has a vast amount of experience to draw upon. Our struggles and hardship, along with our achievements and blessings, teach us life’s lessons. Your experience, your strength and the hope that endures are part of your unique story — and part of the reason why you should tell your life story.

The second primary reason to tell your life story is to leave your mark. We all want to be remembered. Certainly we want to be remembered for the good we’ve done and for the significant accomplishments in our lives. There is satisfaction in a life well-lived. Living a life fully… richly experiencing what it means to be alive and involved in helping others is a great thing. To share with others who you are, what you are about and what you believe in is passing on some very valuable personal history.

2O7XoZ Numerous honorary degrees; major thoroughfare in Detroit is named after her; SCLC sponsors an annual Rosa Parks Freedom Award; Spingarn Medal, NAACP, 1979; Martin Luther King Jr Award, 1980; Service Award, Ebony, 1980; Martin Luther King Jr Nonviolent Peace Prize, 1980; The Eleanor Roosevelt Women of Courage Award, Wonder Women Foundation, 1984; Medal of Honor, awarded during the 100th birthday celebration of the Statue of Liberty, 1986; Martin Luther King Jr Leadership Award, 1987; Adam Clayton Powell Jr Legislative Achievement Award, 1990; Rosa Parks Peace Prize; honored with Day of Recognition by Wayne County Commission; U.S. Congressional Gold Medal of Honor, 1999.

According to the old saying, “some people are born to greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.” Greatness was certainly thrust upon Rosa Parks, but the modest former seamstress has found herself equal to the challenge. Known today as “the mother of the Civil Rights Movement,” Parks almost single-handedly set in motion a veritable revolution in the southern United States, a revolution that would eventually secure equal treatment under the law for all black Americans. “For those who lived through the unsettling 1950s and 1960s and joined the civil rights struggle, the soft-spoken Rosa Parks was more, much more than the woman who refused to give up her bus seat to a White man in Montgomery, Alabama,” wrote Richette L. Haywood in Jet. “[Hers] was an act that forever changed White America’s view of Black people, and forever changed America itself.”

From a modern perspective, Parks’s actions on December 1, 1955 hardly seem extraordinary: tired after a long day’s work, she refused to move from her seat in order to accommodate a white passenger on a city bus in Montgomery. At the time, however, her defiant gesture actually broke a law, one of many bits of Jim Crow legislation that assured second-class citizenship for blacks. Overnight Rosa Parks became a symbol for hundreds of thousands of frustrated black Americans who suffered outrageous indignities in a racist society. As Lerone Bennett, Jr. wrote in Ebony, Parks was consumed not by the prospect of making history, but rather “by the tedium of survival in the Jim Crow South.” The tedium had become unbearable, and Rosa Parks acted to change it. Then, she was an outlaw. Today she is a hero.

qmm2mv Parks was born Rosa McCauley in Tuskegee, Alabama. When she was still a young child her parents separated, and she moved with her mother to Montgomery. There she grew up in an extended family that included her maternal grandparents and her younger brother, Sylvester. Montgomery, Alabama, was hardly a hospitable city for blacks in the 1920s and 1930s. As she grew up, Rosa was shunted into second-rate all-black schools, such as the Montgomery Industrial School for Girls, and she faced daily rounds of laws governing her behavior in public places. Ms. magazine contributor Eloise Greenfield noted that Rosa always detested having to drink from special water fountains and having to forgo lunch at the whites-only restaurants downtown. Still, wrote Greenfield, “with her mother’s help, Rosa was able to grow up proud of herself and other black people, even while living with these rules…. People should be judged by the respect they have for themselves and others, Mrs. McCauley said. Rosa grew up believing this.”

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