During her lifetime, Rosa Parks was awarded more than two dozen honorary doctorates from universities worldwide. She was also inducted as an honorary member of the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority. Rosa Parks, along with Elaine Eason Steel, started the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development in February of 1987. The Institute was developed in honor of Rosa's husband, Raymond Parks who had died in 1977 of cancer. The Institute's main function is to run the "Pathways to Freedom" bus tours, which take young people around the country to visit historical sites along the Underground Railroad and to important locations of events in Civil Rights history. Three days after Rosa’s death in October of 2005, The House of Representative and the United States Senate approved a resolution to allow Rosa Parks' body to be viewed in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda. Rosa was the first woman and the second black person to ever have the honor of lying in state in the Nation’s capitol. On the first anniversary of her death, President George W. Bush ordered a statue of Parks to be placed in the National Statuary Hall in Washington, D.C. When signing this resolution, President Bush stated “By placing her statue in the heart of the nation's Capitol, we commemorate her work for a more perfect union, and we commit ourselves to continue to struggle for justice for every American."(Rosa Parks Facts) Rosa was a great accomplisher and she received a lot of awards and she should be very grateful on how she changed society.
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