Rosa Parks

One December evening, a woman left work and boarded a bus for home. She was tired; her feet ached. But this was Montgomery, Ala., in 1955, and as the bus became crowded, the woman, a black woman, was ordered to give up her seat to a white passenger. When she remained seated, that simple decision eventually led to the disintegration of itutionalized segregation in the South, ushering in a new era of the civil rights movement. This was the story I´d heard from the time I was curious enough to eavesdrop on adult conversations.

I was three years old when a white bus driver warned Rosa Parks, “Well, I´m going to have you arrested,” and she replied, “You may go on and do so.” As a child, I didn´t understand how doing nothing had caused so much activity, but I recognized the template: David slaying the giant Goliath, or the boy who saved his village by sticking his finger in the dike. And perhaps it is precisely the lure of fairy-tale retribution that colors the lens we look back through. Parks was 42 years old when she refused to give up her seat. She has insisted that her feet were not aching; she was, by her own testimony, no more tired than usual. And she did not plan her fateful act: “I did not get on the bus to get arrested,” she has said. “I got on the bus to go home.”

Her work in the N.A.A.C.P. sharpened her sensibilities so that she knew what to do — or more precisely, what not to do: Don´t frown, don´t struggle, don´t shout, don´t pay the fine? And she had participated in a Highlander Folk School (the first and only at that time) integrated training program for activists to make a difference.

Rosa Parks: 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. However, I did not have at the moment of my arrest any idea of how the people would react. And since they reacted favorably, I was willing to go with that. We formed what was known as the Montgomery Improvement Association, on the afternoon of December 5th. Dr. Martin Luther King became very prominent in this movement, so he was chosen as a spokesman and the president.

Local civil rights leader E.D. Nixon exclaimed, “My God, look what segregation has put in my hands!” Parks was not only above moral reproach (securely married, reasonably employed) but possessed a quiet fortitude as well as political savvy — in short, she was the ideal plaintiff for a test case. She was arrested on a Thursday; bail was posted by Clifford Durr, the white lawyer whose wife had employed Parks as a seamstress. That evening, after talking it over with her mother and husband, Rosa Parks agreed to challenge the constitutionality of Montgomery´s segregation laws. During a midnight meeting of the Women´s Political Council, 35,000 handbills were mimeographed for distribution to all black schools the next morning. The message was simple:

“We are...asking every Negro to stay off the buses Monday in protest of the arrest and trial... You can afford to stay out of school for one day. If you work, take a cab, or walk. But please, children and grown-ups, don´t ride the bus at all on Monday. Please stay off the buses Monday.” It took over a year of walking, ride sharing and boycotting the buses before Montgomery gave in to integration of the buses.

“As I look back on those days, it´s just like a dream. The only thing that bothered me was that we waited so long to make this protest and to let it be known wherever we go that all of us should be free and equal and have all the oppor tunities that others should have.”

Source: www.time.com

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