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Dec. 1, 1955: Rosa Parks sparks Civil Rights Movement

From the Montgomery Advertiser:

Parks’ quiet courage helped change the world

Rosa Parks, the world’s beloved mother of the civil rights movement, is dead but her spirit lives on.

The woman whose quiet strength broke the back of Jim Crow law never will be forgotten. She died of natural causes in her Detroit home Oct. 24, 2005. Young and old have been impacted by her legacy and millions will pause this week to reflect on her life.

“The contributions she made to this city, this state and this nation will forever live so that those persons unborn will be able to read about her and realize there was a quiet, passionate, considerate woman who lived in Montgomery and who was determined to enjoy her constitutional rights even though it meant going to jail,” said civil rights attorney Fred Gray, who served as Parks’ attorney nearly 50 years ago.

Parks’ home for decades had been Detroit, but Montgomery has always claimed her, as it did so many of her contemporaries, including civil rights figures the Revs. Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph Abernathy, and Clifford and Virginia Durr, two of the movement’s most vocal white supporters who played a major role in Parks’ life.

Others had defied bus drivers before Parks, but her stand was the one that stuck and gave birth to the famous 381-day Montgomery bus boycott, a nonviolent war waged by more than 40,000 black Montgomerians against one unjust system that forced them to pay the same bus fare as whites but skirted them to the back of the bus.

That was the law in Montgomery then. Parks challenged that law on Dec. 1, 1955. And the impact of her decision reverberated throughout America, propelled a young Martin Luther King Jr. to national prominence and gave rise to many other demonstrations that would soon follow.

“What she did contributed so much to the success of whatever we did in trying to break down the segregated rules and regulations we had in the community and the world,” said close friend Johnnie Carr.

Taking a stand

It all started with one word: “No.”

Parks didn’t wake up that December morning thinking that she would get on a bus, defy a bus driver and then go to jail for it.

But she was aware of the mistreatment of blacks on city buses. She had heard the horror stories.

Fred Gray Sr., who was Parks’ friend and lawyer after her arrest 50 years ago, often discussed with the seamstress the ill treatment of black passengers on the city buses — often described by many blacks in the community as “the bus situation.”

Parks and Gray talked about the incident involving Claudette Colvin, a 15-year-old student at Booker Washington High School. Colvin was arrested March 2, 1955, for refusing to give up here seat to a white female passenger on a Capital Heights bus in downtown Montgomery.

Gray writes of Parks in his book, “Bus Ride to Justice”: “We discussed the possibility of a boycott. I told Mrs. Parks, as I had told other leaders in Montgomery, that I thought the Claudette Colvin arrest was a good test case to end segregation on the buses.”

But the black leadership, Gray recalled, thought they needed to wait. It was comforting to Gray to meet someone like Parks who understood he belief, who shared his passion for confronting the bus situation.

“Mrs. Parks shared my feelings that something had to be done to end segregation on the buses,” Gray writes.

That something manifested itself in the form of civil disobedience. Parks just gave it a voice.

“Her refusal to get out of the seat was the last straw. Black people en masse said, ‘Enough is Enough.’ Rosa was the last stand, and her arrest galvanized this community to stand up for dignity,” said local historian Gwendolyn Patton.

Getting arrested

“You all make it light on yourselves and let me have those seats,” said James F. Blake, the bus driver who ordered the 42-year-old seamstress to move out of her seat.

Parks heard him. The two were not strangers. They had conflict 12 years earlier, when Parks tried to board the segregated bus through its front doors, a privilege allowed only to the public transportation system’s white riders at the time.

Knowing it was a move that could get her arrested — and even worse, harassed or beaten — Parks tried to board the bus through the front. But Blake wouldn’t have it.

He ordered her off that bus that day, and she got off as ordered. What neither Blake nor Parks realized at the time was that they’d meet again, and this time, Parks wasn’t going to obey his orders. In fact, this time, she was going to give him one.

“You all make it light on yourselves and let me have those seats,” Blake said to the seamstress.

Parks heard him, but she didn’t move.

She couldn’t move because, as she has explained in numerous interviews, something greater was at work there on that Montgomery City Lines bus.
There was no way that she was going to give up by getting up. No, not that day.

“God sat with me as I remained calm and determined not to be treated with less dignity than any other citizen of Montgomery,” Parks said in her last interview with the Montgomery Advertiser in 2000.

Three other black passengers sat with Parks on the first seat in the black section of the bus. They all knew the rules: If the front section of the bus — designated for whites — became full, blacks had to get up from their seats in the back and make room for white passengers, even if that meant standing up as the bus was in motion.

Parks, sitting in the back section, still did not budge. Blake threatened to call city police and have her arrested.

“You may go on and do so,” Parks replied to the driver. And so she was arrested. On that day, Parks, who had never been arrested in her life, was taken into custody, booked and placed behind bars.

Popular legend has it that when Parks refused to give up her seat half a century ago, she was tired and weary from a long day of work. The tale — told and retold countless times as the movement took hold — painted a vivid picture.

But Parks, over the years, expounded on that legend, clarifying what “tired” really meant.

“Our mistreatment was just not right, and I was tired of it,” Parks would later write in one of her books.

A little known fact: Parks was arrested for disorderly conduct — not for violating segregationist laws.

Being a pillar of her community, Parks’ reputation had been beyond reproach amongst those who knew her. To learn that she was arrested for disorderly conduct outraged many.

That day, Parks’ good friend, Fred Gray, knew the time had come.
He had been out of town that day and returned to hear the news of Parks’ arrest.

Gray writes in his book Bus Ride to Justice: “My immediate little world began to change. And so did the larger world . . . The opening shot had now been fired. With Mrs. Parks’ arrest came the beginning of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. It changed the history of civil rights in Alabama, in the nation, and in the world.”

Clifford and Virginia Durr assisted civil rights activist E.D. Nixon in getting Parks out of jail. Parks was later fined $10, plus $4 in court costs.

The boycott drew to a close shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court, in the case of Browder v. Gayle, ruled against the Montgomery ordinance that caused Parks’ arrest, thus outlawing racial segregation on public transportation in the city and throughout the South.

Things of the past

Born Rosa Louise McCauley on Feb. 4, 1913, the fair-skinned, skinny girl with a big smile was not bound for greatness.

Young Rosa lived in a time when white men were men and black men were called “boys” or worse. They lived in separate worlds, bound by a social order many dared not question, but just lived by.
Within that order, blacks sought to carve out so

me niche of dignity for themselves, although mainly delegated to tasks of hard manual labor jobs found in the bluest of blue-collar life. As unjust and unreal as that world seems now, that is the way it was.

It is the world in which Young Rosa lived and ultimately helped force to change.

Young Rosa was born in Tuskegee to James McCauley, a carpenter, and Leona McCauley, a teacher. At later moved to her grandparents’ farm in Pine Level to live with her mother and younger brother, Sylvester.

She attended the Montgomery Industrial School for Girls, a private school founded by liberal-minded women from the northern United States.

The school’s philosophy of self-worth fell in line with Leona McCauley’s advice to her daughter to “take advantage of the opportunities, no matter how few they were.”

She married Raymond Parks in 1932, finished her high school education and made a home in Montgomery. Few are aware that the couple was also active in many early struggles for equality.

The Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development, co-founded in Detroit by Rosa Parks in 1987 in her husband’s memory, in its history describes Raymond Parks as a skilled barber and a man who greatly influenced Parks’ activist sensibilities.

The two encouraged and helped others to register to vote and promoted equity in education and employment.

Noted historian and author Douglas Brinkley, who wrote “Rosa Parks,” has said the Raymond Parks helped to trigger his wife’s determination to help the movement through the NAACP.

In 1943, Rosa Parks became one of the first women to join Montgomery’s chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. That same year, she worked with the NAACP’s state president, E.D. Nixon, to mobilize a voter registration drive in Montgomery and was elected secretary of the Montgomery branch, a post she held until 1956.

A legacy remains

Rosa Parks still lives on in Montgomery.

Idessa Redden, 92, who drove people to work during the bus boycott, remembers Parks as a soft-spoken woman. “She was a very humble lady,” Redden said in a recent interview. “I would have thought Ms. Parks would be the last person who would refuse to give her seat. But you never know.”
Thelma Glass, who helped to print and distribute fliers telling Montgomery’s black citizens not to ride the bus following Parks’ arrest, said Monday night that she was saddened by the icon’s death.

“She’s a legacy,” Glass said. “She’ll never die.”

Glass said she is disappointed that Parks will not be able to enjoy the upcoming 50th anniversary commemoration.

“Everyone was getting ready for it,” Glass said. “I knew she was ill, that her health was failing. I was just hoping she would be able to see the celebration.”

Parks’ last visit to the Capital City was Dec. 1, 2000, the 45th anniversary of her courageous stand on a segregated city bus.

Troy State University paid tribute to the icon with a three-story, 55,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art library and museum designed to serve TSUM’s students and serve as a research center for the civil rights movement.
During her visit to the campus, Parks was rolled out on the stage of the Davis Theatre in a wheelchair where she waved to a cheering, emotional crowd.
So frail, she could hardly speak. She uttered what appeared to have been, “I thank God.”

Even in her frailty, she seemed so strong. But that day, although her words were few, her smile and eyes offered many thanks to the scores who came to celebrate the opening of the library and museum bearing her name. Her life had not always been a moment of glory.

In 1994, the unthinkable happened. Parks, then 81 years old, was attacked and injured in her Detroit home. A late-night prowler had some how managed to get into her home.

At the time, Detroit police officials reported to the Associated Press that the assailant entered into the house through a door whose hinges had been knocked off and the man claimed to Parks that someone else had damaged her door and that he had come to protect her.

But the man, whom police said reeked of alcohol, allegedly hit Parks and fled from the scene. Parks was hospitalized for bruises to her face. Strong and defiant, Parks did not allow the break-in or the attack stop her. She continued to lead the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute and make appearances across the country.

At the White House in 1999, President

Clinton signed a bill to award the Congressional Gold Medal to Parks. He had already given her the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.
Parks’ battles did not stop after leaving Montgomery. In 1999, the civil rights heroine sued rap duo OutKast for using her name as the title of its Grammy-nominated song, “Rosa Parks,” from 1998′s “Aquemini.”

Parks’ attorneys claimed that the song unfairly misrepresented her character. With its graphic lyrics and profanity, the song outraged some Parks’ supporters.

OutKast maintained that its lyrics were protected by the First Amendment. The chorus goes as follows: Ah ha, hush that fuss/everybody move to the back of the bus/Do you wanna bump and slump with us/We the type of people make the club get crunk.

Parks’ lawyers argued that the group exploited the civil rights activist’s name for profit, and sought to block use of her name. The sides settled in 2004.
Parks pursued other missions aside from wiping her name from a hip-hop tune she was not fond of. After the death of her husband, she embarked on a mission to aide the nation’s young.

Parks, along with her longtime friend Elaine Eason Steele, established the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development in Detroit. The institute proclaims its central mission is to “motivate youth to reach their highest potential.”

The organization has numerous programs designed to nurture the dreams of youths, expose them to civil rights history and empower them to become productive members of society.

Parks’ “Pathways to Freedom” program traces the underground railroad during the days of slavery as well as key civil rights sites of the 20th century. Students travel primarily by bus across the country to learn of the history of the movement.

On its Web site, the institute describes Parks’ philosophy as one of “quiet strength.”

“Quiet strength incorporates life skills which demonstrate dignity with pride, courage with perseverance and power with discipline in a comfortable environment of peace,” a statement from the site reads.
Dignity. Pride. Perseverance. Discipline. All attributes that Parks possessed throughout her life and exhibited in her tireless commitment to change.
By Jannell McGrew
Montgomery Advertiser

Staff writer Crystal Bonvillian contributed to this report.