From the Back of the Bus to the U.S. Capitol
On Thursday, December 1, 1955, a 42-year-old woman named Rosa Parks boarded a bus to commute home from a long day of work at the Montgomery Fair department store.
Per Alabama law, the front of a Montgomery bus was reserved for white citizens, and the seats behind them for black citizens. At some point during the ride, a white man entered and found all the seats in the designated “white” section taken. The driver of the bus told the riders in the first row of the “colored” section to stand, in effect adding another row to the “white” section. The three others obeyed. Parks did not.
A standoff ensued and, eventually, two police officers were called to the stopped bus, assessed the situation, and placed Parks in custody, lightning a fire under the burgeoning civil rights movement–and making Parks an instant icon.
But there is so much more to her story than just the episode that made her famous.
According to history.com:
Rosa Louise McCauley was born in Tuskegee, Alabama, on February 4, 1913. She moved with her parents, James and Leona McCauley, to Pine Level, Alabama, at age 2 to reside with Leona’s parents. Her brother, Sylvester, was born in 1915, and shortly after that her parents separated. Rosa’s mother was a teacher, and the family valued education. Rosa moved to Montgomery, Alabama, at age 11 and eventually attended high school there, a laboratory school at the Alabama State Teachers’ College for Negroes. She left at 16, early in 11th grade, because she needed to care for her dying grandmother and, shortly thereafter, her chronically ill mother. In 1932, at 19, she married Raymond Parks, a self-educated man 10 years her senior who worked as a barber and was a long-time member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He supported Rosa in her efforts to earn her high-school diploma, which she ultimately did the following year.
Inspired by her husband’s activism, Rosa joined the NAACP herself in 1943, working specifically on criminal justice and its application in Alabama communities. In a city divided by Jim Crowe laws, blacks were segregated, mistreated, and often falsely accused of crimes. Conversely, many black women who were victimized by white men found it difficult to achieve justice for their attackers. Despite her husband’s fears for her safety, Rosa made these issues her priority, eventually becoming chapter secretary working closely with chapter president Edgar Daniel Nixon.
Hearing story after story of injustice and heartache solidified her heart for activism and, although the December 1 bus ride would be the catalyst that sparked a movement, it was not the first time Rosa defied the law in that particular way. In 1943, Rosa stepped onto another bus driven by the very same driver with which she would clash twelve years later, James Blake. During this incident, she resisted the rule that black people had to disembark and re-enter through the back door. She stood her ground until Blake pulled her coat sleeve, enraged, to demand her cooperation. Rosa left the bus rather than give in.
That would not be the case in 1955.
Word of Rosa’s arrest spread quickly and E.D. Nixon saw it as the perfect opportunity to mobilize an increasingly fed-up population of African-Americans. The plan? Having all black riders boycott Montgomery buses on the day of Parks’ trial, which was scheduled for Monday, December 5. By midnight, 35,000 fliers were being mimeographed to be sent home with black schoolchildren, informing their parents of the planned boycott. Although Rosa was found guilty of violating segregation laws, given a suspended sentence and fined $10 plus $4 in court costs, the boycott born from her burden was a roaring success. What started as a one-day event eventually ended up lasting an entire year and led to the creation of the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) to manage it. Its leader? None other than a young newbie by the name of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Junior.
During the boycott, a lawsuit filed by Rosa and her family questioning the validity of segregation laws traveled through the courts, eventually ending up the hands of the U.S. Supreme Court. Despite harassment and violence and even the loss of her job, Rosa stayed strong, and on November 13, 1956, the Supreme Court ruled that bus segregation was unconstitutional; the boycott ended December 20, a day after the Court’s written order arrived in Montgomery.
Despite this, Montgomery remained a hostile environment and, eventually, Rosa and her family decided to move to Detroit. Rosa became an administrative aide in the Detroit office of Congressman John Conyers Jr. in 1965, a post she held until her 1988 retirement. In 1987, she co-founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development, to serve Detroit’s youth.
After her retirement, she traveled to lend her support to civil-rights events and causes and, in 1999, was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest honor the United States bestows on a civilian. When she died at age 92 on October 24, 2005, “the mother of the Civil Rights Movement” became the first woman in the nation’s history to lie in honor at the U.S. Capitol.
