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October 25, 2005

Rosa Parks passes away at 92

Rosa Parks passed away yesterday. She was 92 years old.

Parks had a long history of activism and public service. Contrary to popular belief, she didn't refuse her bus seat on a spur-of-the-moment. It was planned as a way to spur change.

» Civil-rights activist, born in Tuskagee, Alabama, USA. After briefly attending Alabama State University, she married and settled in Montgomery, AL, where by 1955 she was working as a tailor's assistant in a department store. Contrary to most early portrayals of her as merely a poor, tired seamstress, who on the spur of the moment refused to surrender her seat in a bus to a white passenger, she had long been a community activist. She had served as secretary of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and had worked for the Union of Sleeping Car Porters. She had also been involved in previous incidents when refusing to leave a bus seat. By forcing the police to remove, arrest, and imprison her on this occasion, and then agreeing to become a test case of segregation ordinances, she played a deliberate role in instigating the Montgomery bus boycott (1955–6). Dismissed from her job at the department store, in 1957 she became a youth worker in Detroit, MI. As she eventually earned recognition as the ‘midwife’ or ‘mother’ of the civil rights revolution, she became a sought-after speaker nationally.

Parks wasn't the first person to refuse to give up her seat--but she was the "best" candidate to spur the community into action. She was not the first person to be angry about the treatment of Black people on the bus--the Montgomery Bus Boycott was an idea that had been brewing for a long time.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott officially started on December 1, 1955. That was the day when the blacks of Montgomery, Alabama, decided that they would boycott the city buses until they could sit anywhere they wanted, instead of being relegated to the back when a white boarded. It was not, however, the day that the movement to desegregate the buses started. Perhaps the movement started on the day in 1943 when a black seamstress named Rosa Parks paid her bus fare and then watched the bus drive off as she tried to re-enter through the rear door, as the driver had told her to do. Perhaps the movement started on the day in 1949 when a black professor Jo Ann Robinson absentmindedly sat at the front of a nearly empty bus, then ran off in tears when the bus driver screamed at her for doing so. Perhaps the movement started on the day in the early 1950s when a black pastor named Vernon Johns tried to get other blacks to leave a bus in protest after he was forced to give up his seat to a white man, only to have them tell him, "You ought to knowed better."

The simple version of the story leaves out some very important people, such as Jo Ann Robinson, of whom Martin Luther King, Jr., would later write, "Apparently indefatigable, she, perhaps more than any other person, was active on every level of the protest." [3] She was an educated woman, a professor at the all-black Alabama State College, and a member of the Women's Political Council in Montgomery. After her traumatic experience on the bus in 1949, she tried to start a protest but was shocked when other Women's Political Council members brushed off the incident as "a fact of life in Montgomery." After the Supreme Court's Brown decision in 1954, she wrote a letter to the mayor of Montgomery, W.A. Gayle, saying that "there has been talk from 25 or more local organizations of planning a city-wide boycott of buses." By 1955, the Women's Political Council had plans for just such a boycott. Community leaders were just waiting for the right person to be arrested, a person who would anger the black community into action, who would agree to test the segregation laws in court, and who, most importantly, was "above reproach." When fifteen year old Claudette Colvin was arrested early in 1955 for refusing to give up her seat, E.D. Nixon of the NAACP thought he had found the perfect person, but Colvin turned out to be pregnant. Nixon later explained, "I had to be sure that I had somebody I could win with." Enter Rosa Parks.

Parks had taken an interest in Claudette Colvin's case. She was active in the NAACP. Popular myth portrays her as someone who was thrown into the civil rights movement. That's not the case. Parks was active in it for years. Although she worked as a seamstress, it was not work she chose; she was educated but couldn't find a job to match her skills. Black women were hired for domestic and menial jobs.

Parks was also sitting in the Black section of the bus. The rule was Blacks had to give up their seats for standing Whites. Park's protest highlighted the great absurdity of these 'rules'. Everyone in her row was expected to give up their seats for one White man, since it was forbidden for a White person and a Black person to sit in the same row together. Three out of the four people in her row gave up their seats. Parks remained sitting. She was subsequently arrested and charged.

The boycott sparked legal action against the organizers, attempts at false 'compromises', terrorism, subterfuge, and court challenges. Rev. Martin Luther King was one of 89 Blacks charged under an old law prohibiting boycotts--he was ordered to pay $1000 in fines and court costs or serve over a year in prison. 'Compromises' that were nothing more than the status quo were offered. King and another boycott organizer, E.D. Nixon of the NAACP, became targets of terrorists; their homes were bombed. Blacks citizens created a carpooling system; those with cars provided transport for those without. They were routinely pulled over and charged with minor infractions. Their liability insurance was revoked several times.

Once the Supreme Court decided on the matter, things did not just end there. Snipers shot at the newly-integrated buses. Whites tried (and failed at) starting their own bus system. There was a wave of bombings against churches, the homes of prominent Blacks, and black businesses. The perpatrators never served one day in jail.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott spawned the creation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, with Martin Luther King as its president. It inspired and launched the civil rights movement.

For that, we owe Rosa Parks and everyone in the movement our gratitude.

Posted by at October 25, 2005 03:49 PM