MarkKawakami.com

One little woman can change the world

Categories: Political

Rosa Parks: 1913 - 2005

It was just one little act of defiance, but the entire civil rights movement in America would have run a different course without Rosa Parks. She lived in a world where not giving up her seat to a white man was grounds for arrest. I can't imagine what that's like. Because of her, I don't have to.

From the CNN obituary:

At the time of her arrest, Parks was 42 and on her way home from work as a seamstress.

She took a seat in the front of the black section of a city bus in Montgomery. The bus filled up and the bus driver demanded that she move so a white male passenger could have her seat.

"The driver wanted us to stand up, the four of us. We didn't move at the beginning, but he says, 'Let me have these seats.' And the other three people moved, but I didn't," she once said.

When Parks refused to give up her seat, a police officer arrested her.

As the officer took her away, she recalled that she asked, "Why do you push us around?"

The officer's response: "I don't know, but the law's the law, and you're under arrest."

She added, "I only knew that, as I was being arrested, that it was the very last time that I would ever ride in humiliation of this kind."

Four days later, Parks was convicted of disorderly conduct and fined $14.

That same day, a group of blacks founded the Montgomery Improvement Association and named King, the young pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, as its leader, and the bus boycott began.

For the next 381 days, blacks -- who according to Time magazine had comprised two-thirds of Montgomery bus riders -- boycotted public transportation to protest Parks' arrest and in turn the city's Jim Crow segregation laws.

Black people walked, rode taxis and used carpools in an effort that severely damaged the transit company's finances.

The mass movement marked one of the largest and most successful challenges of segregation and helped catapult King to the forefront of the civil rights movement.

The boycott ended on November 13, 1956, after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling that Montgomery's segregated bus service was unconstitutional.

posted by Mark Kawakami at October 24, 2005, 10:10 PM // permalink // (4) Comments

There's more fun at "Mark Kawakami: A casual relationship with reality" home