Rosa Parks: The woman who didn’t get up from her seat to sit white

With her refusal to give up her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955, black seamstress Rosa Parks (1913-2005) gave a major boost to the civil rights movement in the United States.

Local black community leaders called for a bus boycott, which began the day Parks was convicted of violating segregation laws. Led by a young Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the boycott lasted more than a year, during which Parks – not coincidentally – lost her job, and ended only when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that segregation on buses was unconstitutional.

“People say I didn’t give up my job because I was tired,” Parks wrote in her autobiography, “but that’s not true. I wasn’t physically tired… No, I was just tired of giving in.”

Her young life

Rosa Louise McCauley was born in Tuskegee, Alabama, on February 4, 1913. Her mother was a teacher and her family highly valued education and learning. Rosa moved to Montgomery, Alabama, at the age of 11 and attended a Negro-only high school. She left at 16, before she could finish her education, since she had to care for her dying grandmother and, shortly afterward, her ailing mother.

In 1932 at 19, she married Raymond Parks, a self-educated man 10 years her senior who worked as a barber and was a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He supported Rosa in her efforts to finish high school, which she eventually did the following year.

The Roots of Activism

Raymond and Rosa, who worked as a seamstress, were respected members of Montgomery’s large African-American community. Coexisting with whites in a town where “Jim Crow” segregation laws were in effect, however, was fraught with daily frustrations: Blacks could attend only certain (inferior) schools, could drink water only from special taps, could borrow books only from the “black” library, and so on.

Despite Raymond’s discouragement for her safety, in December 1943 Rosa joined the Montgomery NAACP herself and became secretary. He worked closely with President Edgar Daniel (E.D.) Nixon, a railroad porter known in the city as an advocate for blacks who wanted to register to vote.

December 1, 1955: The Arrest of Rosa Parks

On Thursday, December 1, 1955, 42-year-old Rosa Parks was returning home by bus after a long day at work. Montgomery’s black residents often avoided buses because of a law that wanted “Negroes in the back” which they considered utterly demeaning. However, 70% of the riders on a typical day were black, and on that day Rosa Parks was among them.

The segregation that had been passed into law said that only white passengers could sit in the front of a bus, while blacks would sit exclusively in the back. However, it was at the driver’s discretion to lift a black person out of their seat to seat a white person if no seats were available.

At one point along the route, a white man was left standing because the other white men had sat in the seats in the section designated as “white”. So the driver told the passengers in the four seats in the front row of the “colored” section to stand up. He actually added another row to the “white” section. The three others obeyed. Parks did not.

“People say I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired,” Parks wrote in her autobiography, “but that’s not true. I wasn’t physically tired … No, I was just tired of giving in.”

At last, two police officers approached the stopped bus and arrested Parks.

Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott

The news of her arrest spread across most of the state that night. Rosa, however, was released on bail a few hours later. And while Nixon was trying to plan what they would do at the trial, another idea came up: Montgomery’s blacks would boycott the buses on the day of the trial.

On Dec. 5, Parks was found guilty of violating the segregation law. Her sentence was suspended and she was ordered to pay a $10 fine plus $4 in court costs. Meanwhile, black participation in the boycott was much larger than originally predicted. So Nixon and a few ministers decided to seize the momentum and continue their struggle, led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. who was then only 26 years old.

The boycott sparked anger among much of Montgomery’s white population, as well as violence after Nixon and M.L. King’s homes were bombed. The violence did not deter anyone, and what was now happening in Montgomery gained the attention of the American and international press.

On November 13, 1956, the Supreme Court ruled that bus segregation was unconstitutional. The boycott ended on December 20. One day after the Court’s written directive arrived in Montgomery. Parks, who had lost her job and experienced harsh harassment, became known as “the mother of the civil rights movement.”

After the boycott

Facing continued harassment and threats in the wake of the Negro victory, Parks and her husband moved to Detroit and she became an administrative assistant in John Conyers’ office, a position she held until 1988.

In the years after her retirement, she traveled extensively and wrote her autobiography, “Rosa Parks: My Story.” In 1999 Parks was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, the United States’ highest honor for a civilian. (Other recipients include George Washington, Thomas Edison, Betty Ford and Mother Teresa.)

When she died at age 92 on October 24, 2005, she became the first woman whose body was displayed in a popular pilgrimage in the Capitol Rotunda.

This article was published in LIFO.gr in 2015 by A. Kolovou.