It’s been 60 years since Rosa Parks, an assistant to a tailor in Montgomery, Ala., refused a request from a white bus driver to give up her seat on a city bus.
On Dec. 1, 1955, the driver asked Parks and three others to move from their seats to make room for four white people who wanted to sit down. Three of the people moved, Parks refused. She was arrested for violating the city's segregation laws.
Though it was not the first time someone refused to give up a seat on a bus in Alabama’s capital city, it became the fuse that ignited a year-long boycott of the public transit system there, forcing court cases, and, eventually a ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court affirming segregation as unconstitutional.
Here's a look at some of the events that led up to Parks' move and what happened afterward.
- An often overlooked fact about Parks is that refusing to give up her seat that day was not her first act of protest over Montgomery's stark segregation laws. Prior to her arrest on Dec. 1, Parks had been kicked off of various busses for refusing to reboard the bus from the back door after she had paid a fare at the front of the bus – a common practice in Montgomery and across the South.
- What Parks refused to do that day was to move from the middle section of the bus where both blacks and whites were allowed to sit. Black passengers would be routinely told to move from that area to the back of the bus so white passengers could sit there if no more seats were left in the all-white front section.
- Parks was told to move by James Blake, the bus driver. When she refused, Blake summoned the police.
- Parks was not the first person to stand up to the segregated practices of Montgomery's public transit system. Viola White had refused to move during an incident in 1944. She was beaten on the bus, and fined $10 at her trial. Hilliard Brooks was shot and killed during an incident in 1950 when he refused to pay the fare and reboard the bus at the rear entrance. Police claim Brooks attacked the police officer arresting him and his killing was in self-defense. In March of 1955, nine months before Parks was arrested, Claudette Colvin, then 15, was arrested for refusing to give up her seat. In October of 1955, Mary Louis Smith, an 18-year-old refused to move for a white person to sit down. She, too, was arrested.
- Parks was asked many times about the motivation for her actions on that day. As she was being arrested, she said, she thought about the unfairness of the practice and those who had died in an attempt to simply have the rights the U.S. Constitution affords them. "Let us look at Jim Crow for the criminal he is," she said she thought at the time, "and what he had done to one life multiplied millions of times over these United States."
- Parks went on to say that she decided in that moment that what she could do to help the cause was not move from the seat. "When that white driver stepped back toward us, when he waved his hand and ordered us up and out of our seats, I felt a determination to cover my body like a quilt on a winter night."
What followed the arrest?
- The next day, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the Rev. Ralph Abernathy and a host of other black ministers formed the Montgomery Improvement Association and called for a boycott of Montgomery's public transit system.
- The boycott lasted from Dec. 5, 1955 to Dec. 20. 1956. A federal lawsuit (Browder v. Gayle) grew out of Parks' and the other women's actions, and a few months after her arrest, a three-judge panel ruled 2-1 that "because the conditions deprived people of equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment" the practice of segregating city busses was unconstitutional. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the ruling later that year.
- In her autobiography, "Rosa Parks: My Story," Parks clarified her reasoning for remaining in her seat that day, correcting some reports that she didn't move because she was tired from a long day of work. "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 died in 2005.
Sources: Atlanta Journal-Constitution; "Rosa Parks: My Story;" Rosa Parks Facts.com; history.com
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