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October 25, 2005
Remembering Rosa Parks
I remember my father's story of riding a Greyhound bus from West Virginia to Virginia. After crossing the stateline, the bus driver stopped to segregate the blacks from the whites on board. My father was young and going to a naval base. He had only heard of such nonsense, and now he was participating witness to it. The decade was the 1950s.
Almost exactly 50 years ago today, Rosa Parks decided to change things in the segregated South. On December 1, 1955, she sat alone in the white section of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and when asked to move would not. And that made all the difference. She was arrested, galvanizing African-Americans to action. They boycotted the bus system for 381 days until the Supreme Court ruled the Montgomery law unconstitutional, propelling Martin Luther King, Jr. on to the national stage. [Actually there were at least two other women who had been arrested that same year, but because their backgrounds were too risque, they would not make a good test case to the court.]
Where did Rosa Parks get her inner strength?
Her mother would scold her: You'll be lynched before you're 20. So she always had a strong spirit. She was not only a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) by the time she was arrested; she was the secretary for the Montgomery NAACP. In retrospect much later in her life, she said it was simply that she was "tired of givng in."
Here are some images of Rosa Parks:
Rosa being booked for sitting in the "white" section of a bus
Rosa being criminalized for breaking segregation laws
| By wjbailes | 02:50 AM
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