Edited by Yujin Tchun
On the 1st of December, 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested after refusing to give up her seat to a white man on a crowded public bus, which breached the city’s racial segregation laws. The racial segregation law in question required African Americans to sit in the back of public buses and give up those seats to white passengers if the bus became too full. This act would later gain significant historical fame, as it initiated the Montgomery Bus Boycott and paved the way for the future of the civil rights movement.
Rosa Louise McCauley was born in Tuskegee, Alabama on February 4th, 1913, to parents James and Leona McCauley. Her mother Leona was a teacher who valued education and sent her to Alabama State Teachers’ College for Negroes. After leaving at the age of sixteen to care for her grandmother, she would eventually meet Raymond Parks, who was a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). After getting married in 1932, Parks began to get involved in the Montgomery chapter of NAACP, where she would eventually become the chapter’s secretary (History.com, 2009).
When Parks entered the bus on that fateful day, she had been sitting down in the front row of the Black section before the bus driver asked her and three others to move out of the way for a white man. While those three others obliged, Parks remained seated - an unplanned action on her part. After learning about her arrest, NAACP as well as other individual African American activists called for a bus boycott to be held on the following Monday (December 5th).
This boycott was a great success, with Martin Luther King, Jr., speaking out to bring continuous protests for their rights (History.com, 2010). The Montgomery Bus Boycott would eventually end after more than a year of protests. Given that 70 percent of the people using public buses were African American, to begin with, the municipal transport system suffered great financial loss during this time.
When summarising this event in an autobiography, Parks stated, “I had been pushed around all my life and felt at this moment that I couldn’t take it anymore. When I asked the policeman why we had to be pushed around? He said he didn’t know. ‘The law is the law. You are under arrest’. I didn’t resist.” (The Guardian, 2019).
References
Rosa Parks. (2009, November 9). History.com. Retrieved November 23, 2021, from
https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/rosa-parks
Rosa Parks ignites bus boycott. (2010, February 9). History.com. Retrieved November 23,
2021, from https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/rosa-parks-ignites-bus-boycot
Smith, D. (2019, December 4). Rosa Parks' exhibition presents civil rights heroes in her own
words. The Guardian. Retrieved November 23, 2021, from
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/dec/04/rosa-parks-exhibition-civil-rights-
library-of-congress
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