Civil Rights Activist Rosa Parks

 

Rosa Parks statue Montgomery, Alabama

“People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”

Rosa Parks

(1913 - 2005)

Birthday Anniversary - February 4th

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks boarded a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Instead of going to the back of the bus, which was designated for African Americans, she sat near the front. When the bus started to fill up with white passengers, the bus driver asked Parks to move. She refused. Her resistance set in motion one of the largest social movements in history, the Montgomery Bus Boycott. 

She was booked in the city jail and held in a dank, musty cell. Her boss and friend E. D. Nixon, NAACP president bailed her out. 

Hear it from the lady herself:

(You can listen to Rosa Parks recount the events here, four months later, in April 1956.)

According to the Washington Post, she had suffered much trouble from this same bus driver. Even a dozen years earlier - November 1943 - the same bus driver tried to make Parks exit the front of his bus and reenter through the crowded rear entrance. Parks refused, so he grabbed her sleeve to push her off the bus.

She intentionally dropped her purse on a seat and sat down in the white section to retrieve it.

Rosa Parks was a lifelong activist who challenged white supremacy for decades before she became the famous catalyst for the Montgomery bus boycott. She was a woman who, from her youth, didn’t hesitate to indict the system of oppression around her. 

She joined the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP in 1943, becoming branch secretary. She spent the next decade pushing for voter registration, seeking justice for black victims of white brutality and sexual violence, supporting wrongfully accused black men, and pressing for desegregation of schools and public spaces. She was committed to both the power of organized nonviolent direct action and the moral right of self defense.

By the time Parks boarded the bus in 1955, she was an established organizer and leader in the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama. Parks not only showed active resistance by refusing to move that day, she also helped organize and plan the Montgomery Bus Boycott. 

Her courageous act and the subsequent Montgomery Bus Boycott led to the integration of public transportation in Montgomery. Her actions were not without consequence. She was jailed for refusing to give up her seat and lost her job for participating in the boycott.

Nearly nine months before Rosa Parks’ famous arrest, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin was arrested on a Montgomery bus for refusing to yield her seat to a white passenger. She refused to move, began yelling about her constitutional right and was physically removed from the bus by police.

Colvin joined four other plaintiffs in the court case Browder v. Gayle, challenging the constitutionality of bus segregation ordinances of Montgomery.

When the Supreme Court upheld the ruling on Dec. 20, 1956, ordering Alabama to end racialized bus segregation, so ended the remarkable 381-day bus boycott by the black citizens of Montgomery, which had begun the Monday after Parks’ arrest. 

Rosa Parks (purse in hand) statue at US Capitol

After the boycott, Parks and her husband moved to Hampton, Virginia and later permanently settled in Detroit, Michigan. Parks work proved to be invaluable in Detroit’s Civil Rights Movement. She was an active member of several organizations which worked to end inequality in the city.  On October 24th, 2005, at the age of 92, she died of natural causes leaving behind a legacy of resistance against racial discrimination and injustice.

Learn more about the -  Montgomery Bus Boycott