Black History Month Rosa Parks

ON DEC. 1, 1955, a 42-year-old woman named Rosa Parks boarded a city bus in Montgomery, AL, to take her home from work. The laws at the time required African-Americans to sit in the back section of the bus, separate from white people. Following the laws, Rosa Parks got on the bus at the front to pay her fare to the bus driver, then got off the bus, re-entering through the back door to take her seat in one of the rows reserved for black people.

At the time, Montgomery bus drivers actually maintained a line separating the white and black sections of the bus. As the bus filled up that day, the bus driver moved the line back to make more seats available to white passengers. Eventually, the line reached the row Parks was sitting in. When the bus driver asked Parks to give up her seat for a white passenger, Parks refused.

The law gave bus drivers the authority to assign seats based on skin color, but not to make a passenger relinquish his or her seat. However, this was the custom in Montgomery, and the bus driver had Parks arrested. She was charged with violating a city ordinance, released on bail, and fined a total of $ 14.

Parks arrest and defiant act of courage angered Montgomerys black community, and inspired them to fight back against the racial injustice of the times. Black leaders organized a boycott of the Montgomery bus system, and recruited a local minister named Martin Luther King, Jr., to lead the boycott.

The bus boycott lasted 382 days. It crippled the Montgomery public transportation system as about 40,000 black commuters stayed off the buses. Activists took the case to court, and the Supreme Court ruled that Montgomerys laws segregating public transit were unconstitutional. Rosa Parks had touched off one of the civil rights movements earliest, and greatest, victories.

But Rosa Parks paid a price for that success. She and her husband both lost their jobs and were threatened with violence, and eventually had to leave Montgomery. They relocated to Detroit, MI, where Rosa Parks worked as a secretary for Congressman John Conyers, served on the board of the Planned Parenthood Federation and, with a friend, founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development, which educates young people about the history of the civil rights movement.

During her lifetime, Parks was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Congressional Medal of Honor, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Award and the NAACPs Spingarn Medal. She published two memoirs about her life.

When Rosa Parks died at age 92 in 2005, she was given the honor of lying in state at the Capitol Rotunda in Washington, DC., where 50,000 people came to pay their respects.

Picture Above: Rosa Parks on a Montgomery bus. Her refusal to give up her seat to a white man sparked the civil rights movement.

New York Post, December 15, 2010
Written by: Robin Wallace