35TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION Super Hero ROSA PARKS

Rosa Parks 

She was born Rosa Louise McCauley in Tuskegee, Alabama, in 1913. For the next 42 years, she would live her life in obscurity until one fateful day in Montgomery, Alabama. 

In December of 1955, 42-year-old seamstress Rosa Parks joined the workers at the bus stop after a hard day at her tailoring job. It seemed like the bus would never come. When it finally arrived, all the seats in the back, where Blacks were allowed to sit, were quickly taken. Parks sat down in the white section. The bus driver told her and several other African Americans to give up their seats to whites who got on after she did. Parks refused to move: The bus driver called the police, and Parks was arrested. She and her husband later lost their jobs. 

Her refusal to give up her seat sparked a movement against segregation in Montgomery, which started with a 381-day bus boycott by African Americans. The leader of that boycott went on to become quite famous—a young Black minister named Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. So successful was the boycott that Dr. King was arrested and his life was threatened. Subsequently, King and his father, Martin Luther King, Sr., and other ministers, including the reverends Ralph Abernathy and Wyatt T. Walker, founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). These events, kicked off by Parks's nonviolent passive resistance, officially launched the Civil Rights Movement. On December 21, 1956, the boycott ended when the U.S. Supreme Court declared bus segregation unconstitutional. 

Parks was not the first Black woman to refuse to move to the back of a Montgomery bus. A year earlier, another Black woman had been arrested for a similar "offense." But she was an unwed mother, and Montgomery's civil rights leadership feared she would not be an acceptable "role model" around which the community could rally. 

Nor was this Parks's first attempt to fight discrimination. In the 1930s, Parks and her husband, Raymond, had worked courageously in a futile attempt to free the Scottsboro Boys, nine Black men who were falsely accused of raping two white women. She knew she was putting her life at risk by working for this cause. During the 1950s, Parks was the secretary of the Montgomery branch of the NAACP. 

Later, she and her husband moved to Detroit. For more than 23 years, she served as a staff assistant to Representative John Conyers of Michigan. In 1994, Parks, then 81 years old, was attacked by a robber. With help from the community, the robber was caught and convicted, and he apologized.  She passed away on October 24, 2005. 

In the mid-1990s, Parks wrote her autobiography, Rosa Parks: My Story, then authored Quiet Strength, an autobiography with Gregory Reed, which focuses on the faith and hope of a woman who changed a nation by starting the Civil Rights Movement. In her book, Parks recalls her outrage at being asked to stand up so a white man could sit. "After so many years of oppression and being a victim of mistreatment that my people had suffered, not giving up my seat—and whatever I had to face after not giving it up—was not important." 

From Great African Americans.  Copyright, Publications International, Ltd.