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“The only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”

Today is the 55th anniversary of Rosa Parks’ infamous stand sit during the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Her daring refusal to move to the back of the bus was not a decision made lightly because she was simply “too tired.” “The only tired I was,” Parks wrote in Rosa Parks: My Story (1992), “was tired of giving in.” The following short biography of Parks comes from Darlene Clark Hine, editor of  Black Women in America.

Parks, Rosa (b. 4 February 1913 ; d. 24 October 2005 ), civil rights activist. From the moment her photograph was first published in newspapers across America, Parks, with her quiet dignity, has been a symbol for the civil rights movement in this country. Those who orchestrated the Montgomery bus boycott bypassed several other women to choose Parks as a representative of all the black women and men who were forced to live with Jim Crow laws and customs in the South, and she lived up to their expectations.

Early Life and Activism
Rosa Louise McCauley was born in Tuskegee, Alabama, the daughter of James McCauley , a carpenter, and Leona Edwards , a teacher. Her father migrated north to find work when Rosa was two years old and did not often communicate with the family after that. Her mother moved Rosa and a younger brother to Pine Level, Alabama, to be nearer her own parents and siblings. In Pine Level, Parks worked as a field hand, in addition to taking care of her grandparents while her mother worked, often as a teacher. Parks’s mother homeschooled her until she was eleven, then sent her to live with her aunt in Montgomery so that she could go to school. While attending the Montgomery Industrial School for Girls, she did household chores for her aunt and also went out to do domestic work outside the home. She attended the Booker T. Washington High School but left before graduation to take care of her mother. Her experience in all these situations left her angry about the injustices in the world, and, when she was nineteen, she met Raymond Parks , a barber who was involved in the civil rights movement. On 19 December 1932 they were married.

The couple did not have children. With her husband’s encouragement, Parks completed her high school education, receiving a diploma in 1934 . From the beginning of their marriage, both were social activists. They worked to secure the release of the Scottsboro Boys, nine black youths accused of raping two white girls. Parks joined the Montgomery Voters League and worked to enfranchise African Americans in the community. During the 1940s she joined the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP and served as secretary of the branch from 1943 until 1956 . Edgar Daniel Nixon Jr. , organizer of the Black Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters Union in Montgomery and head of the Progressive Democrats, was president of the local NAACP chapter.

Particularly good at working with young people, Parks helped train a group of NAACP youths to protest segregation in the Montgomery Public Library, and she participated in voter-registration drives. In 1945 Parks became one of just a few African Americans in the city who were registered to vote. The registrar had failed her the first two times she took the literacy text, but she remained determined, a foreshadowing of her determination in choosing to be arrested rather than to continue to suffer segregation on Montgomery’s buses. She took classes and attended seminars in civil rights tactics. In June 1955 Parks attended a summer workshop at the Highlander Folk School founded by Myles Horton in Monteagle, Tennessee, long a training ground for labor organizers and social activists. In 1959 the state of Tennessee would label the Highlander Folk School a subversive organization. Still, at Highlander, Parks, like her fellow activists Ella Baker and Septima Clark , acquired a deeper appreciation of and skills for community organizing, use of direct-action tactics, and administration of citizenship schools. Their preparation and long involvement in community affairs placed black women at the center of the civil rights movement. Parks’s grounding in the organizational and institutional infrastructure of the Montgomery black community was essential to her ability to inspire the modern civil rights movement.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott
On 1 December 1955 , Parks took the bus home. She had often walked rather than deal with Jim Crow segregation on the buses. The city’s complex segregation laws dictated that African Americans pay their fares, exit the bus, and reenter through the rear door. Whites enjoyed the privilege of sitting in the front of the bus, and blacks occupied reserved seats in the rear. If the white section filled up and more white passengers boarded the bus, the black passengers were required to move. On this day, Parks decided to ride the bus anyway. And on this day, she refused to comply with the bus driver James F. Blake ’s order that she give the bus seat she occupied in the first row of the black section to a white male passenger. Three other African Americans vacated their seats, but Parks refused to move.

Parks had not planned to disobey the law on that fateful day, but her thirty-year commitment to social justice prepared her to do so. For her defiance of the segregation ordinance, the Montgomery police took Parks to jail. Montgomery’s police lieutenant, Drue Lackey (who served as police chief from 1965 to 1970 ), took her fingerprints. Responding to a call from Nixon, the white attorney Clifford Durr took her case, but Nixon posted her bail. The court found Parks guilty of disorderly conduct and fined her ten dollars and another four dollars in court costs.

Parks on her way to jail in Montgomery, Alabama, December 1955. Her attorney Charles D. Langford is at the right; a deputy police officer is at the left. [Library of Congress]

Parks was not the first black woman to have suffered arrest for refusal to countenance bus segregation. In 1941 an angry mob beat Hannah Cofield before she was arrested for refusing to yield her seat to a white passenger. In 1944 Viola White met a similar fate. In March 1955 , a few months before Parks’s arrest, Claudette Colvin , an unmarried, pregnant fifteen-year-old girl, had objected to vacating her seat and was jailed.

The local black leadership had long debated challenging bus segregation, but decided to wait for an incident involving someone who embodied the politics of respectability and whose private life could withstand relentless scrutiny. Thus, although Cofield, White, Colvin, and later, Mary Louise Smith , protested bus segregation, their resistance failed to ignite a larger social protest movement. Propitiously, in July 1955 , the U.S. Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, declared in Flemming v. South Carolina Electric and Gas Company that bus segregation, even on buses that operated within one state, was unconstitutional.

When the police arrested Parks, diverse factions within the Montgomery black community swung into nonviolent direct action. On 2 December 1955 the Women’s Political Council (WPC), under the leadership of Jo Ann Robinson , an English professor at Alabama State College, mimeographed and, with two hundred volunteers, distributed more than thirty thousand handbills imploring black citizens to stay off the buses. The flyer declared,

Another Negro woman has been arrested and thrown into jail, because she refused to get up out of her seat on the bus for a white person to sit down….Negroes have rights, too, for if Negroes did not ride the buses, they could not operate….The next time it may be you, or your daughter, or mother. ( Robinson , pp.45-46)

Actually, the WPC had long prepared to declare a boycott. Black leaders called a mass meeting at Holt Street Baptist Church and voted to continue the boycott under the aegis of the newly formed Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA). A number of women served on the MIA executive committee, including Robinson and Parks and Erna Dungee Allen , who served as financial secretary. A young minister of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. , accepted the presidency of the MIA and led the discussions and negotiations with white authorities. Parks’s arrest sparked the bus boycott movement that began on 5 December 1955 and lasted 381 days, ending on 20 December 1956 . The black attorney Fred D. Gray , on behalf of the MIA, filed a lawsuit against segregation in federal court on 1 February 1956 . On 2 June 1956 , in a two to one decision, the federal court found the Montgomery bus segregation ordinances to be unconstitutional. On appeal, on 13 November 1956 , the U.S. Supreme Court concurred with the federal court, ruling that racial segregation on public transportation in Montgomery and throughout the South was unconstitutional.

Later Life and Legacy
Parks’s successful challenge to racial segregation attracted threats of violence and harassment and resulted in the loss of her job as a seamstress at Montgomery Fair Department Store. In 1957 Raymond and Rosa Parks and Rosa’s mother joined her younger brother, Sylvester, in Detroit to seek jobs and personal security. For several years, Parks worked as a seamstress. In 1965 she accepted a special assistant position on the staff in the Detroit office of Representative John Conyers Jr . She remained in his employ for nearly twenty years, during which time she assisted Conyers in his efforts to make Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a national holiday. In 1977 Parks’s husband and brother died. Ten years later she and a friend, Elaine Eason Steele , founded a nonprofit organization, the Raymond and Rosa Parks Institute for Self-Development, to honor her husband’s memory and commitment to the struggle for social justice and human rights.

In the last decades of the twentieth century Parks received national recognition for her role in the civil rights movement. The NAACP gave her its highest honor, the Spingarn Award, in 1977 . She also received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. On 15 June 1999 , Parks was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal. In introducing the bill authorizing the award, Representative Julia Carson of Indiana declared, “Rosa Parks is the Mother of America’s Civil Rights Movement. Her quiet courage that day in Montgomery, Alabama, launched a new American revolution that opened new doors of opportunity and brought equality for all Americans close to a reality.” In 2003 , the home Parks was living in at the time of the bus boycott, 620-28 Cleveland Court, was placed on the National Register of Historic Places. Parks died of natural causes at her home on 24 October 2005 ; she was ninety-two. After lying in honor in the Capitol Rotunda (the first woman to be so honored), Parks was laid to rest in Detroit, Michigan. Her funeral was attended by more than 4,000 mourners.

Bibliography
-Brinkley, Douglas . Rosa Parks. New York: Viking, 2000 .
-King, Martin Luther, Jr. Stride toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story. New York: Harper, 1964 .
-Parks, Rosa , with Jim Haskins . Rosa Parks: My Story. New York: Dial, 1992 .
-Robinson, Jo Ann Gibson . The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It: The Memoir of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987 .
-Thornton, J. Mills, III. Dividing Lines: Municipal Politics and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002 .
-United States House of Representatives Press Release , Carson Calls for Cosponsers for Bill to Award Congressional Gold Medal to Rosa Parks, February 24 , 1999 .

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  2. Mrs. Bessie Cofield

    Rosa Parks was given so many awards and none were ever given to the person who seemed to have really started the movement Hannah Cofield.

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