Rosa Parks

Abstract

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus and was arrested. Her courageous action galvanized a yearlong community boycott and helped usher in a new chapter of the Black freedom struggle. Her bus stand was part of a lifetime of courage and political activism. Born in Tuskegee and raised in Pine Level, Alabama, Rosa Parks spent nearly twenty-five years of her adult life in Montgomery, tilling the ground for a broader movement for racial justice to flower. Joining a small cadre of activists in transforming Montgomery’s NAACP into a more activist chapter, she served as secretary of the branch for most of the next twelve years and in the late 1940s was elected secretary for the Alabama state conference of the NAACP. Through the organization, she pressed for voter registration, documented white brutality and sexual violence, pushed for desegregation, and fought criminal injustice in the decade after WWII. Coming home from work that December evening, she was asked by bus driver James Blake to give up her seat on a segregated Montgomery bus. “Pushed as far as she could stand to be pushed” she refused and was arrested. That act of courage galvanized a year-long community boycott of Montgomery’s segregated buses, catapulting a young Martin Luther King Jr. to national attention and leading to the Supreme Court’s decision ordering the desegregation of Montgomery’s buses. Parks’s act and the bus boycott it produced is often seen as the opening act of the modern civil rights movement which rippled across the South and culminated in the passage of the Civil and Voting Rights Acts. Facing continued death threats and unable to find work, the Parks family was forced to leave Montgomery eight months after the boycott’s end for Detroit, where her brother and cousins lived. While the public signs of segregation were thankfully gone, she didn’t find “too much difference” between the extent of housing and school segregation they encountered in the North from that of the South. And so she spent the second half of her life fighting the racism of the North. Awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal, when she died in October 2005 she became the first civilian, the first woman, and the second African American to lie in honor in the US Capitol. In February 2013, a statue in her honor was installed in the US Capitol’s Statuary Hall, the first full statue of a Black person to be put there. Parks is arguably one of the most known and regarded Americans of the 20th century. Yet the story that is regularly told and taught is clouded with myth and misinformation—wrongly asserting that Parks was tired, old, meek, middle-class, and/or an accidental actor. On top of these distortions of her bus stand, most people would be hard-pressed to go beyond that courageous moment on the bus to anything else about her life. Corresponding to this tendency, although children’s and young adult books on her abound, scholarly work focused on Parks is surprisingly thin. Scholars of civil rights history, postwar American history North and South, and American politics have largely not paid in-depth attention to Parks in order to investigate other activists in Montgomery, earlier struggles than the bus boycott, and other movements outside of Montgomery. While this provides needed and important dimensions to our knowledge of the period, it leaves our knowledge of Parks’ history incomplete—until Jeanne Theoharis’s ground-breaking biography The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks. Parks herself wrote an autobiography aimed at young adults that serves as one of the best accounts of her bus stand, the activism that lead up to it, and the boycott that ensued.