25 Days of History: December 1st
- Jordan Spriggs
- Dec 2, 2019
- 6 min read
Updated: Dec 5, 2019
Remembering the courageousness, dedication and empowerment of civil rights icon Rosa Parks
Photography contributions/Image Credits: Harvard University / Wikimedia Commons
Monday, December 2nd, 2019 @ 00:25 (12:25am)
Who Was Rosa Parks, And What Did She Do?
Rosa Louise McCauley Parks, known more commonly as Rosa Parks, was an American activist in the civil rights movement who gained immediate notoriety for her crucial role in the Montgomery bus boycott. Parks' impact and passion towards bettering socio-economic standards for African-Americans eventually bestowed her the titles "the first lady of civil rights" and "the mother of the freedom movement" by the United States Congress.
When And Where Did This Event Occur?
Although Rosa's husband Raymond had previously discouraged her from joining out of fear for her safety, in December 1943 Parks joined the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP, and she became chapter secretary. She worked closely with chapter president Edgar Daniel (E.D.) Nixon. Nixon, a railroad porter, was already well known in the city as an ally for blacks who wanted to register to vote, and also as president of the local branch of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters union.
The day of Parks arrest, at one point on the route, a white man had no seat because all the seats in the designated “white” section were taken. The driver demanded the riders in the four seats of the first row of the “colored” section to stand, in order to add another row to the “white” section. While the three others obeyed, Parks did not and refused to move.
“People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired,” wrote Parks in her autobiography, “but that isn’t true. I was not tired physically… No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”
On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Parks rejected bus driver James F. Blake's demand for her to relinquish her seat in the "colored section" to a white passenger, after the whites-only section reached maximum occupancy. Eventually, two police officers approached the stopped bus, assessed the situation and placed Parks in custody.
Parks used her one phone call to contact her husband, unaware that as she recounted the last few hours of events that occurred to her to him, that word of her arrest had spread rapidly as wildfire. E.D. Nixon was present when Parks was released on bail later that evening. Nixon had hoped for years to find a courageous black person of unquestioned honesty and integrity to become the plaintiff in a case that might become the test of the validity of segregation laws. While discussing her arrest in Parks’ home, Nixon convinced Parks—as well as her husband and mother—that Parks was that plaintiff.
Another brilliant idea arose as well while in the Parks' residence: The blacks of Montgomery would boycott the buses on the day of Parks’ Monday, December 5th trial. By midnight, 35,000 flyers were being mimeographed to be sent home with black schoolchildren, informing their parents of the planned boycott.
On December 5, Parks was found guilty of violating segregation laws and received a suspended sentence and was fined $10, plus $4 in court costs. While her trial was concluding, black participation in the boycott was so much larger than anyone in the local community had ever anticipated. In an effort to take advantage of the momentum from the boycott, Nixon and some local ministers formed the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) to manage the social justice movement, and they elected Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.–new resident to Montgomery and just 26 years old—as the MIA’s president.
As appeals and related lawsuits wended their way through the courts, all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, the boycott engendered anger in much of Montgomery’s white population as well as some violence, and Nixon’s and Dr. King’s homes were bombed. The violence didn’t deter the boycotters or their leaders, however, and the protest in Montgomery continued to gain widespread attention from the national and international press.
It's important to note that Rosa Parks was not the first person to resist bus segregation, but rather became the most controversial and high profile person to have been arrested for such a crime at the time. Parks' prominence in the community beforehand and her willingness to become a controversial figure of strength and dignity in pursuit of equality sparked newfound inspiration in the black community, and that led to the boycott of the Montgomery buses for more than a year. Denizens of Montgomery boycotted the city transit buses beginning just a few days after Parks was arrested on December 5th, 1955, and continued for 13 months until finally ending on December 20th, 1956. The boycott lasted a whopping 381 continuous days. The federal Montgomery bus lawsuit Browder v. Gayle succeeded on November 13, 1956, after the Supreme Court ruled that bus segregation was unconstitutional.
The Montgomery Bus Boycott brought the subject of racial segregation to the forefront of American politics. A lawsuit was filed against the racial segregation laws. On June 4, 1956 the laws were determined unconstitutional. The boycott had worked in that black people were now allowed to sit wherever they wanted to on the bus. In addition, the boycott had created a new leader for the civil rights movement in Martin Luther King, Jr.
Why It Matters
Parks' act of defiance and the Montgomery bus boycott became important symbols of the movement. Parks instantly became an international icon of resistance to racial segregation. She organized and collaborated with civil rights leaders, including Edgar Nixon, president of the local chapter of the NAACP; and Martin Luther King Jr., a new minister in Montgomery who gained national prominence in the civil rights movement and went on to win a Nobel Peace Prize.
At the time, Parks was secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP. She had recently attended the Highlander Folk School, a Tennessee center for training activists for workers' rights and racial equality. She acted as a private citizen "tired of giving in". Although widely honored in later years, she also suffered for her act; she was fired from her job as a seamstress in a local department store, and received death threats for years afterwards.
Shortly after the boycott, she moved to Detroit, where she briefly found similar work. From 1965 to 1988, she served as secretary and receptionist to John Conyers, an African-American US Representative. She was also active in the Black Power movement and the support of political prisoners in the US.
Her Lasting Legacy
After retirement, Parks wrote her autobiography and continued to insist that the struggle for justice was not over and there was more work to be done. Parks received national recognition, including the NAACP's 1979 Spingarn Medal, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Congressional Gold Medal, and a posthumous statue in the United States Capitol's National Statuary Hall. Upon her death in 2005, she was the first woman to lie in honor in the Capitol Rotunda, becoming the third of only four Americans to ever receive this honor. California and Missouri commemorate Rosa Parks Day on her birthday February 4, while Ohio and Oregon commemorate the occasion on the anniversary of the day she was arrested, December 1st.
Since the founding of the practice in 1852, Parks was the 31st person, the first American who had not been a U.S. government official, and the second private person (after the French planner Pierre L'Enfant) to lie in honor in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol. She was the first woman and the second black person to lie in honor in the Capitol. An estimated 50,000 people viewed the casket there, and the event was broadcast on television on October 31, 2005. A memorial service was held that afternoon at Metropolitan AME Church in Washington, DC.
Parks died in 2005 at the age of 92. In a 1995 interview, she said she wasn't angry about being asked to leave her seat, just resolute.
"I don't remember feeling that anger, but I did feel determined to take this as an opportunity to let it be known that I did not want to be treated in that manner and that people have endured it far too long," she said.
She even made her mark in popular culture, for just earlier this year in 2019, Mattel Inc released a Barbie doll in Parks's likeness as part of their "Inspiring Women" series.
Commenti