Today marks the anniversary of Rosa Parks’ bold decision to take a seat for justice on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama.
On Thursday, December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, 42, was commuting home by bus after a long day workday at the Montgomery Fair department store when a white man asked her to give up her seat.
At the time, the front of a Montgomery bus was reserved for white citizens, and the seats behind them were reserved for “colored” citizens, and this was sadly enshrined into state law. However, even in the segregated South, bus drivers were the ones who had the authority to ask a Black person to give up a seat for a white rider.
The driver, James F. Blake, demanded the passengers seated in the first row of the “colored” section to stand, effectively extending the “white” section by an additional row. Still, Parks, already weary of the state’s demeaning laws, refused to give up her seat for the entitled caucasian bus rider.
The three other Black passengers asked to move, obliged.
When Parks refused to give up her seat to a white passenger, the police showed up. As a devoted NAACP member, esteemed in her community, and already a soldier against injustice, she was more than prepared to put up a fight.
Officers quickly placed Parks into custody, where she used her one call from jail to contact her husband and inform him of her arrest. Shortly after, civil rights leader and union organizer E.D. Nixon learned of her unjust detainment and was there to welcome Parks when she was eventually released on bail.
Seeing Park’s passion and conviction, Nixon persuaded Parks—and her husband and mother—that she was the right person to become the plaintiff in a case challenging the validity of segregation laws.
The momentum continued to grow.
Montgomery’s Black community united and agreed to boycott the buses on December 5, 1995, the day of Parks’ trial. By midnight, 35,000 flyers were printed and sent home via the city’s Black schoolchildren, informing their parents of the planned boycott.
At the trial, Parks was found guilty of breaking segregation laws and was hit with a suspended sentence and fined $10 plus $4 in court fees—basically, the price of standing up for her dignity. However, the Black community showed out for the bus boycott in numbers that even the most optimistic could not have foreseen. This sparked Nixon and several other prominent ministers to form the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), which would go on to fight segregation in Montgomery and spawn some of the civil rights movement’s most prominent leaders.
Who did they tap as their leader? Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a 26-year-old rising star in the civil rights community, new in town and ready to do the work!
Following the boycott, Parks and her spouse, Raymond Parks, sadly lost their jobs. Unhinged racists, determined to scare Black people back into their place, firebombed the home of Dr. King. Parks and her husband relocated, settling in Michigan, where she resumed her activism, working in the office of Representative John Conyers until retirement.
National Archives and Records Administration Records of the US Information Agency Record
It was rumored that Parks’ protest was nothing more than an act of tiredness or laziness, but in her autobiography, Rosa Parks: My Story (1992), she shot down the false reports created to undermine her gallant efforts.
“I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was 42. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in,” she explained.
The boycott lasted for 381 days, and on November 13, 1956, the United States Supreme Court handed down a landmark decision in Browder v. Gayle, declaring that Alabama’s bus segregation laws were unconstitutional because they violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.
In the below clip, Karen Hunter and Dr. Greg Carr talk about Rosa Parks. They also discuss Claudette Colvin and the murder of Fred Hampton.
