Queen of the Civil Rights Movement ...Rosa Parks [1913-2005]

"POPULAR LORE HAS IT that Rosa Parks, an unassuming black seamstress, accidentally struck the spark that ignited the civil rights movement when she refused to give her seat to a white man on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955. Americans need to know that the diminutive, bespectacled woman had demonstrated a tough spine and firm confirm commitment to ending racial segregation along before that. In fact, for all her modesty, Rosa Parks was well suited to the the role that catapulted her into history as the FIRST BLACK WOMAN to successfully fight back against legalized segregation in the Deep South-and LIVED to tell the story.

Before the famous incident on the bus, “ I worked on numerous cases with the NAACP but we did not get publicity, “ said Parks during an interview many years later. .. Indeed, a strong desire to right three centuries of racial inequality had burned with Rosa Park’s small community long before the nation turned its eyes on the subject in the mid-fifties...

Born on February 4, 1913, Rosa Louise McCauley spent her earliest years in Tuskegee, Alabama. Her parents, James and Leona McCauley, were respected citizens of their small town. James was a carpenter, while Leona taught elementary school in the rural, segregated village.

When Rosa was two years old, her mother-then separated from Rosa’s father-moved onto her grandparent’s father in Pine Level, Alabama. Rose first went to school in the small building where mother taught, an arrangement that meant the young girl had to keep her mind on her studies...

When Rosa was preparing to enter junior high school, her mother enrolled her in a private school that had been founded years earlier by liberal white women from the North. Called the Montgomery Industrial School for Girls, it offered a philosophy of pride and self-determination to its mostly poor students...Life in the Deep South during the twenties and thirties was especially trying for blacks. Rosa lived much of her young life in fear. Rosa remembers cowering in her bedroom as the thudding hooves of horses carrying white-robed Ku Klux Klansmen sounded near her bedroom windows... As she grew into adulthood, however, Rosa realized that pervasive fear was harmful to any hope of ever attaining true freedom.

Rosa attended Alabama State Teachers College and fell in love with a young man named Raymond Parks, a barber. After Rosa graduated, the young couple married and moved to Montgomery, Alabama, a bustling city that had become a popular location for upward mobile for blacks like the Parks...For the next twenty years, Rosa and Raymond worked tirelessly on campaigns to help better the living conditions of blacks. Much of their work was unheralded at the time, even though they conducted the work at great perils to themselves. During this same period, Rosa also worked as a seamstress and as a maid to help support her family. Such domestic work wasn’t exactly challenging for a woman who had graduated from a respected college. Yet few employment choices existed for black woman like Rosa in the Deep South.

Throughout these frustrating years, Rosa always remember her grandparents-who had been slaves-when the going tough. ”Both of them were before the emancipation, before slavery ended. They suffered a lot as children. They were in SLAVERY, and of course, after slavery life was not much better...” Rosa’s mother was proud of what her parents endured and she instructed Rosa and her brother, Sylvester, to carry themselves well. Rosa says her mother regularly reminded them that “we were human beings and should be treated as such.”

And so thanks to a family history that had instilled a healthy sense of confidence in her dire surroundings, Rosa was prepared for what took place on a chilly afternoon in 1955... On that cold winter day, Rosa was bone tired. She waited for the bus to take her home and when it arrived, she found it crowded with African American passengers. Under the JIM CROW rules, white passengers were allocated seats in the front half of the bus, and the remaining seats were reserved for black passengers. {In her own words, Rosa says}’’ I took a seat that was in back of where the white people were sitting...the last seat. A man was next to the window and I took an aisle seat and there were two women across from me. On about the second or third stop, some white people boarded the bus and there was one [white] man standing. And when the driver notice him standing, he told us to stand up and let him have our seats. He referred to them as “front seats.” And when the other three [black] people, after some hesitancy, stood up, he wanted to know if I was going to stand up, and I was not. And he [the bus driver] told me that he would have me arrested. I told him, ‘You may do that,’ and of course, he did. He didn’t move the bus any further than where we were, and he went out of the bus. Other people got off...didn’t any white people get off, but several black people got off.”

In a few minutes, two white policemen boarded the city bus...So Rosa finally left the bus and was arrested. When the news of her action hit the papers, the local NAACP official became outraged. He called for black Montgomery residents to boycott the city bus service. For the next 382 days, hardly any blacks used the public transportation system in Montgomery, severely hurting the profits of the bus company. Still, the white power structure in Montgomery refused to budge, saying it had a right to treat blacks as second-class citizens. The long boycott was a difficult time for Rosa and other members of her community...many blacks Montgomerians did not own cars and depended on the buses to carry them from their tiny villages on the outskirts of the city into the white-owned businesses and homes where they performed menial but much needed jobs. Only years later did those outside of Montgomery learn that many white women helped the blacks’ cause during this strained period. In the finer homes, many of the top society matrons felt dismayed that their maids and cooks found it necessary to honor the boycott. They arranged clandestine car services for many of the black domestic workers. Against the husbands’ wishes, these white society matrons drove their black workers to and from their jobs for days on end.

And after more than a year of the boycott, Rosa’s case reached the United States Supreme Court. Finally, the highest court in the land found the practice of legalized segregation unconstitutional. It marked the unofficial start of the civil rights movement, Rosa, a small-boned , quiet woman, came to be known as the “MOTHER [Queen] of the CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT...” Rosa’s treatment resulted in the formation of the Montgomery Improvement Association, a grassroots organization devoted to ending legalized segregation in Alabama. The group drew the attention of civil rights activists in other parts of the Deep South, and when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called for marches and sit-ins in segregated towns, he often invoke the image of the small, strong Rosa Parks. Her story galvanized the nation outside of the South. Rosa’s one act of defiance had brought the attention of civil libertarians worldwide to the plight of blacks in the Deep South. Her quiet strength was useful because Rosa had not screamed or kicked or acted out in resistance: she had merely demanded the same human consideration that any one who is tired after a long day of work would have demanded. At the time of her arrest, Rosa was forty-three years old and ha never before been in trouble with the law...

In 1957, Rosa and her husband moved to Detroit. For the next twenty-three years she worked for Democratic congressman John Conyers. She drew some public attention but mostly lived a life of quiet and hard work. Rosa retired from her civil service job at the age of seventy-five. By then her beloved husband had died, but she had kept up the public service her mother had instilled her as a child in Alabama. She opened the Rosa and Raymond Park’s Institute for Self-Development, a youth self esteem and jobs program that is still going strong today. The Detroit News also sponsors the Rosa Parks Scholarship Fund for promising young journalists. In 1986, she was recognized for all her years of dedicated human rights work when she received the prestigious Ellis Island Medal of Honor."


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Excerpts from “Fifty Black Women Who Changed America”

Alexander, Amy “Fifty Black Women Who Changed America” New Jersey: Birch Lane Press, 1999:108