CWA 1180 - News

Rosa Parks, 1913-2005
October 2005

Civil rights activist Rosa Parks died at age 92 on October 24.

Parks made history on December 1, 1955, when her refusal to give up her bus seat to a white passenger triggered the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 and 1956 and set in motion the test case for desegregation.

Parks, a tailor and seamstress with a high school education, has often been portrayed as simply being too tired to move that day. But Parks was no accidental hero. Born in Tuskegee, Alabama, the granddaughter of former slaves, Parks had been a political activist for many years before that fateful bus ride. She and her husband, Raymond, joined the campaign to save the "Scottsboro boys," nine young black men who were falsely accused of raping two white teenagers near Scottsboro, Alabama, in 1931. An all-white jury sentenced eight of them to death, despite strong evidence of their innocence.

In Parks soon became active in the NAACP, working as youth advisor to the civil rights organization's Montgomery branch, and organizing a voter registration drive. In 1943, she was elected chapter secretary. She also had her first dispute with a local bus driver when she tried to defy a rule that required blacks to board buses from the back door. Six months before her famous protest, Parks attended a workshop on school integration for community leaders, held at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had also received training.

Although three black women had been arrested earlier in 1955 for similar acts of defiance, with Rosa Parks opponents of segregation were prepared to mount a counterattack. The Montgomery chapter of the NAACP had been looking for a test case to challenge the legality of segregated bus seating and the morning after Parks' arrest, the NAACP took on her case. Another organization, the Women's Political Council, proposed a one-day bus boycott. Within 24 hours of Parks' arrest, the WPC had distributed more than 52,000 fliers announcing the boycott, which was to take place the day of Parks' trial. On December 5, as buses went through their routes almost empty, Parks was convicted by the local court. She refused to pay the fine of $14, and appealed.

On the evening of December 5, several thousand protesters crowded into the Holt Street Baptist Church to create the Montgomery Improvement Association and rally behind King, its new president, who had just moved to Montgomery. The daylong bus boycott swelled to 381 days, during which time 42,000 protesters walked, carpooled, or took taxis rather than ride Montgomery's segregated city buses. In the end, the district court ruled for the plaintiffs, declaring segregated seating on buses unconstitutional. The decision was later upheld by the Supreme Court.

Parks remained a committed activist throughout her life. In the 1980s she worked in support of the South African antiapartheid movement, and she founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development, a career counseling center for black youth in Detroit.

Speaking in 1992, she said people typically explain her 1955 act by saying "that my feet were hurting and I didn't know why I refused to stand up when they told me. But the real reason of my not standing up was I felt that I had a right to be treated as any other passenger. We had endured that kind of treatment for too long."

Adapted from AfricanAmericans.com and other sources.

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