Rosa Parks: What to know about the ‘Mother of the Civil Rights Movement’
Rosa Parks took a historic stand in opposition to racial segregation when she refused to hand over her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery, Ala. on Dec. 1, 1955.
The “Mother of the Civil Rights Movement” was removed from the first particular person to resist segregation and it wasn’t even the first time Parks had a troublesome encounter with James F. Blake, the bus driver who had Parks arrested when she refused to hand over her seat to a white passenger. But the NAACP and different civil rights leaders had been in a position to use Parks’ stand as a catalyst for the Montgomery bus boycott and the bigger civil rights motion.
The terror of racism was clear to Parks early in her life, as she grew up on a farm outdoors Montgomery, Ala. the place the Ku Klux Klan carried out evening rides.
Parks married Raymond Parks, a member of the NAACP, in 1933. She grew to become a secretary of the NAACP’s Montgomery department in 1943 and managed the office of E.D. Nixon, the president of the chapter via the Nineteen Forties and 50s.
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Her first confrontation with driver Blake got here practically a decade earlier than the incident that might form historical past. With Blake driving, Parks entered the bus and paid her fare. Blake instructed Parks to exit and reenter via the again doorways, which was the norm for Black passengers at the time. When she bought off the bus through the entrance door to stroll to the rear, Blake pulled the bus away, leaving Parks at the bus cease.
The two would come face-to-face with historical past and one another once more on Dec. 1, 1955. The 42-year-old Parks was ordered by Blake to transfer out of her seat on the crowded bus so {that a} white man may take her spot. Three different Black passengers moved, however Parks stood her floor. She was arrested for disorderly conduct.
The authentic police report from the Dec. 1, 1955 arrest of Rosa Parks when she refused to hand over her bus seat to a white man
(National Archives)
Reflecting on the occasion later, she wrote that she had “been pushed around all my life and felt at this moment I couldn’t take it anymore.”
“Let us look at Jim Crow for the criminal he is and what he had done to one life multiplied millions of times over these United States and the world,” she wrote in a note that’s now saved at the Library of Congress.
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Her arrest led to the peaceable Montgomery bus boycott, which lasted 381 days and helped launch then-26-year-old Martin Luther King, Jr. onto the nationwide panorama as a civil rights chief.
This define of the bus was used throughout the trial. Parks was convicted underneath metropolis regulation, however whereas her case was being appealed, a district courtroom dominated that bus segregation was unconstitutional.
(National Archive)
Parks was convicted in the case however whereas her enchantment made its means via the courtroom system, the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama dominated on June 4, 1956, that racial segregation of public buses was unconstitutional. The Supreme Court upheld the resolution on Nov. 13, 1956.
The Montgomery bus boycott was the first of many protests for racial justice that Parks participated in. She took half in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963 and the well-known Selma-to-Montgomery March in 1965 with the late civil rights chief turned member of Congress, John Lewis.
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Parks ultimately went to work for the district workplace of the late Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., from 1965-1988.
Civil rights activist Kwame Ture, previously generally known as Stokely Carmichael, with Rosa Parks
(Library of Congress)
After retiring she acquired the Presidential Medal of Freedom from former President Bill Clinton in 1996 and acquired the Congressional Gold Medal in 1999.
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“Rosa Parks said, ‘I didn’t get on that bus to get arrested. I got on that bus to go home.’ In so many ways, Rosa Parks brought America home, to our Founders’ dream,” Clinton said in 1999 upon presenting Parks with the Congressional Gold Medal.
Parks died in 2005 at the age of 92.
