Rosa Parks
page excerpted from www.virtualscholar.com
On Dec. 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a department store seamstress, was arrested for disorderly conduct in Montgomery, Ala., after she refused to move to the back of a segregated city bus to make room for a white man.
Word of Parks's arrest spread quickly, and the Women's Political Council decided to protest her treatment by organizing a boycott of the buses. The boycott was set for December 5, the day
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Rosa Parks
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of Parks's trial, but Martin Luther King, Jr.and other prominent members of Montgomery's black community realized that here was a chance to take a firm stand on segregation. As a result, the Montgomery Improvement Association was formed to organize a boycott that would continue until the bus segregation laws were changed. Leaflets were distributed telling people not to ride the buses, and other forms of transport were laid on.
The boycott lasted 382 days, causing the bus company to lose a vast amount of money. Meanwhile, Parks was fined for failing to obey a city ordinance, but on the advice of her lawyers she refused to pay the fine so that they could challenge the segregation law in court. The following year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the Montgomery segregation law illegal, and the boycott was at last called off. Yet Parks had started far more than a bus boycott. Other cities followed Montgomery's example and were protesting their segregation laws. The civil rights movement was underway.
A common misconception, created in newspaper and magazine accounts of that day, and sometimes in the classroom, is that Rosa Parks refused to move from her seat because her feet were tired. But she had been active in civil rights long before that incident.
In her latest book, Quiet Strength, she wrote: "My feet were not tired, but I was tired -- tired of unfair treatment. Tired of being pushed around. Tired of seeing the bad treatment and disrespect of children, women and men just because of the color of their skin. Tired of Jim Crow laws. Tired of being oppressed. I was just plain tired."
"To my knowledge it was the first time that practically the entire community of African-Americans, along with a number of white people who joined in with us...we put the bus company out of business for quite a while. And in spite of all of their efforts to get us to return to the buses under the same conditions that we had experienced, we refused to do that. And I think that was very significant." (Rosa Parks)
This seemingly small and insignificant act took on a life of its own and soon spawned an era of active civil rights. The bus line boycott was the kindling added to the smoldering embers of repressed civil rights which quickly burst into the flames of civil rights demonstrations.
The Detroit News. Forty years of success, setbacks. (November 26, 1995)
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2001, United States
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Anita Gonzalez & Ian Granick