Rosa Parks statue on hold

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WASHINGTON, July 31 (UPI) -- Plans to honor Rosa Parks, a heroine of the civil rights movement, with a statue in the U.S. Capitol have languished because the money wasn't appropriated.

Kenneth Edmonds, a spokesman for U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., D-Ill., told the Detroit News that the appropriation appears to have been an oversight.

Parks, who died in 2005 at the age of 92, would be the first black woman to be honored in the National Statuary Hall. Jackson plans to introduce a bill to extend for two years authorization for the statue.

Dec. 1, 1955, the day that Parks was arrested in Montgomery, Ala., for refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white man, is generally held to be the beginning of the civil rights movement. The bus boycott that followed gained national attention as did a young Montgomery minister, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Edmonds told the News that once the money has been appropriated the process of choosing a sculptor and commissioning the work should be quick.