|
Rosa Parks |
|
|
|
Parks, Rosa Louise McCauley (b. February 4, 1913, Tuskegee, Ala.), American civil rights activist, who is often called the "Mother of the Civil Rights Movement"; her arrest for refusing to give up her seat on a bus triggered the 1955-1956 Montgomery bus boycott and set in motion the test case for the desegregation of public transportation.On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, the arrest of a black woman, Rosa Parks, for disregarding an order to surrender her bus seat to a white passenger galvanized a growing movement to desegregate public transportation, and marked a historic turning point in the African American battle for civil rights. Yet Parks was much more than an accidental symbol. It is sometimes overlooked that at the time of her arrest, she was no ordinary bus rider, but an experienced activist with strong beliefs. Rosa Parks was the granddaughter of former slaves and the daughter of James McCauley, a carpenter, and Leona McCauley, a rural schoolteacher. The future civil rights leader grew up in Montgomery, Alabama, where she attended the all-black Alabama State College. In 1932 Parks married Raymond Parks, a barber, with whom she became active in Montgomery's chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).Raymond Parks' s volunteer efforts went toward helping to free the defendants in the famous Scottsboro case, and Rosa Parks worked as the chapter's youth adviser. In 1943, when Rosa Parks actually joined the NAAC, her involvement with the organization became even greater as she worked with the organization's state president E. D. Nixon to mobilize a voter registration drive in Montgomery. That same year Parks also was elected secretary of the Montgomery branch.In the early 1950s Parks found work as a tailor's assistant at the Montgomery Fair Department Store. She had a part-time job working as a seamstress for Virginia and Clifford Durr, a white liberal couple who encouraged Parks in her civil rights work. Six months before her famous protest, Rosa Parks received a scholarship to attend a workshop on school integration for community leaders at the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, and spent several weeks there.The segregated seating policies on public buses had long been a source of resentment within the black community in Montgomery and in other cities throughout the Deep South. African Americans were required to pay their fares at the front of the bus, and then reboard through the back door. The white bus drivers, who were invested with police powers, frequently harassed blacks, sometimes driving away before African American passengers were able to get back on the bus. At peak hours, the drivers pushed back boundary markers segregating the bus, crowding those in the "colored section" so that whites could be provided with seats. On December 1, 1955, Parks took her seat in the front of the "colored section" of a Montgomery bus. When the driver asked Parks and three other black riders to relinquish their seats to whites, Parks refused (the others complied). The driver called the police, and Parks was arrested. Later that night she was released, after Nixon and the Durrs posted a $100 bond. Although three black women had been arrested earlier that year for similar acts of defiance, and Parks herself had been thrown off a bus by the same driver 12 years before, this time the opponents of segregation were prepared to mount a counterattack. The Montgomery chapter of the NAACP had been looking for a test case to challenge the legality of segregated bus seating, and to woo public opinion with a series of protests. The morning after her arrest, Parks agreed to let the NAACP take on her case. Another organization, the Women's Political Council (WPC), led by JoAnn Robinson, initiated the idea of a one-day bus boycott. Within 24 hours of Parks's defiance, the WPC had distributed more than 52,000 fliers announcing the bus boycott which was to take place the day of Parks's trial. On December 5, as buses went through their routes virtually empty, Parks was convicted by the local court. She refused to pay the fine of $14, and with the help of her lawyer, Ed D. Gray, appealed to the circuit court.On the evening of December 5, several thousand protesters crowded into the Holt Street Baptist Church to create the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) and to rally behind its new president, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who had just moved to Montgomery as the new pastor at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. What was planned as a day-long bus boycott swelled to 381 days, during which time 42,000 protesters walked, carpooled, or took taxis, rather than ride the segregated city buses of Montgomery. In a move designed to reverse the segregation laws on public transportation, King and the MIA filed a separate case in United States District Court. The District Court ruled for the plaintiffs, declaring segregated seating on buses unconstitutional, a decision later upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.Parks was widely known as "the Mother of the Civil Rights Movement," but her iconic stature afforded her little financial security. She lost her job as a seamstress at Montgomery Fair and was unable to find other work in Montgomery. Parks and her husband relocated to Detroit, Michigan in 1957, where they struggled financially for the next eight years. Parks's fortunes improved somewhat in 1965, when Congressman John Conyers hired her as an administrative assistant, a position she held until 1987.Parks has remained a committed activist. In the 1980s she worked in support of the South African antiapartheid movement, and in 1987 she founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development in Detroit, a career counseling center for black youth.A friend once described Parks as someone who, as a rule, did not defy authority, but once determined on a course of action, refused to back down: "She might ignore you, go around you, but never retreat." Contributed By: Marian Aguiar |
| Ms Encarta Africana |
| By: Darryl Bishop |
