Rosa Parks (1913 – 2005):
“I would like to be remembered as a person who wanted to be free…so other people would also be free.”
We were taught a simple fable that went something like this: On December 1, 1955, a weary Black woman in Montgomery, Alabama, sat in the “For Whites Only” front section of a bus and started the Civil Rights movement. Parks never stopped explaining that this was not really what happened. Still, she continues to be presented as a simple soul with tired feet, a rather condescending misinterpretation of a woman who was an experienced and respected campaigner for Civil Rights.
When Parks was born, Alabama was rigidly segregated. Park’s mother, a strong believer in equality and justice for all, told her about her grandfather, Sylvester Edwards, who had defied racism, and encouraged her to do the same. Determined that her daughter would be well educated, she also sent Parks to a school for girls. In this era, educated Black girls could work either as clerks or seamstresses. Parks became skilled on the sewing machine. She later wrote about how racism permeated the details of everyday life. Black women would be served last if they tried to buy new shoes; when they tried a hat on, the saleswoman would put a bag inside it.
In the early 1940s, Parks became involved in the Montgomery branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), where she set up a youth council. The Montgomery NAACP chapter decided to take up segregation on public transport, continuing a long tradition of Black direct action on buses. In 1943, she was kicked off a bus when she refused to enter through the back door. She became known to bus drivers, who would often refuse to let her on.
In the late 1940s the Alabama State Conference of NAACP branches was formed, and Parks became its first secretary. This brought her into contact with longstanding Civil Rights activists, including Philip Randolph, who was president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) from 1925 to 1968. In 1941 he led a march of 50,000 against unfair government and war industry employment practices, which resulted in the federal Fair Employment Practices Commission. Parks knew Ella Baker, who had worked with the Young Negroes Cooperative League, part of Franklin D. Roosevelt‘s 1930s New Deal, and then organized for the NAACP in the south, becoming field secretary in 1940. Baker later helped create the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), bringing ideas of non-violent direct action and collective leadership to a new generation.
Parks had worked closely with the local president of the NAACP in Montgomery, Ed Nixon. He led the local Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters for 15 years and was president of the Progressive Democrats. The Civil Rights movement was linked to the progressive labor and social movements, and people took part in several organizations.
In the early 1950s people were coming to Nixon with their complaints and the idea of a boycott. The first mass bus boycott had occurred in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 1953 and the same tactic was tried in Virginia with some success. In 1954, a group of professional black women in Montgomery, the Women’s Political Council (WPC), protested to the mayor about segregation on the buses, telling him that feeling was so strong that 25 local organizations were planning a boycott.
Early in 1955, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin was dragged off a bus and arrested. The NAACP was ready to take up her case. Inspired by the great victory against segregation in education, which had been won in 1954 with the Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision, they wanted to challenge the law. But, Colvin turned out to be pregnant, and they knew this would bring bad publicity.
Parks, by contrast, was married, respectable, quiet and dignified. She understood local politics and, moreover, had been encouraged by a white Civil Rights activist Virginia Durr, whose husband served as a lawyer for the NAACP, to attend workshops on how to resist segregation.
Parks left the department store where she did repairs on men’s clothing, as usual on December 1. It was true that she was tired after work and pain in her shoulders, back and neck was troubling her. By chance the bus driver happened to be the very man who had forced her off the bus back in 1943. She did not, as myth would have it, sit in the whites-only front part, but sat beside a Black man at the back. As more white people got on the driver told her to give up her seat. She refused. The driver threatened: “If you don’t stand up, I’m going to call the police.” Parks replied: “You may do that.”
Parks was arrested and found guilty of violating the segregation law and fined. It was decided that her arrest would serve as the test case. Nixon began organizing the boycott immediately. Park’s arrest was announced to the students and teachers at Alabama State College, telling them that a boycott was being organized. They began mimeographing leaflets and getting them distributed. Nixon contacted church leaders and progressive ministers, including Ralph Abernathy, who presented demands to the bus company on December 5. A coalition of local groups formed the Montgomery Improvement Association, which coordinated the boycott.
On the evening of December 5, thousands of people gathered at the Holt Street Baptist church where the young preacher Martin Luther King, Jr. praised Parks as “one of the finest citizens of Montgomery” and called for action in protest of her arrest. His speech, which was televised, invoked American democracy and a commitment to justice and equality for all. King:
“We in Montgomery are determined to work and fight until justice runs down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
Nearly all of Montgomery’s Black citizens participated in the boycott which lasted for 381 days. Nearly 100 people were arrested, including Parks and King. In January and February 1956, the houses of Nixon and King were bombed. The boycott spread to Tallahassee that spring. On December 20, SCOTUS supported the decision of a lower court and federal injunctions were served on the bus company officials to end segregation. Montgomery’s buses were integrated by the end of 1956.
A great victory had been won. However, Parks was fired from her tailoring job and in 1957 she left Montgomery for Detroit, because of the constant harassment.
In 1965, though, Parks was on the historic march through Montgomery when Martin Luther King called for a “March on Poverty”. And, on December 1, 1995, the 40th anniversary of the Montgomery bus boycott was marked by a commemorative ceremony in her honor on the spot where she had been arrested.
She continued to be very active, travelling extensively to lecture on the Civil Rights movement and the social and economic problems that continued to face black Americans. In 1987 she founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development, to help young people learn more about Civil Rights. In October 1995, she addressed the Million Man March in Washington, in 1996 she toured the USA, and visited South Africa, plus she was presented, by President Clinton, with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor that can be bestowed upon a civilian by the United States Government. In 1999, she was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, Congress’s highest expression of national appreciation.
In 1994, the Ku Klux Klan applied to sponsor a portion of Interstate 55 in St. Louis County and Jefferson County, Missouri, near St. Louis, for cleanup. This allowed them to have signs stating that this section of highway was maintained by their charming organization. Since the state could not refuse the KKK’s sponsorship, the Missouri legislature voted to name the highway section the “Rosa Parks Highway”. When asked how she felt about this honor, she commented:
“It is always nice to be thought of.”
In her memoir, Rosa Parks: My Story (1992), she wrote:
“My desires were to be free as soon as I learned that there had been slavery of human beings.”
Parks carried these desires for freedom with her throughout her life. Her defiance sparked a nationwide effort to end racial segregation of public facilities. She left this world in October 2005.
Her funeral was held in Montgomery. That evening the casket was transported to Washington, D.C., transported by a bus, just like the one in which she made her protest, to lie in honor in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol.
Parks was the first American who had not been a U.S. government official to be honored in this way. She was the first woman and only the second Black person to lie in honor in the Capitol. 150,000 people viewed her casket there.
