Rosa Parks wasn’t the first black woman in the south who refused to give up their seats to white passengers on the transit buses. Parks had been born into a world in Jim Crow Alabama where black people had very little civil rights. In 1900, the Montgomery City Council had passed an ordinance basically saying that white drivers and train conductors could set assigned “colored” seats or even change them whenever they wanted.
This segregated section also meant that black people couldn’t even pass through the aisle to get to the back of the bus. They often had to step on the bus, pay the fare, step off and go to the rear entrance. However, in 1943, Parks had stepped on a bus driven by James F. Blake, paid the fare and then went to sit down. However, Blake informed her she had to get off and go to the rear entrance.
When Parks stepped off the bus, Blake wouldn’t let her back on and drove off. From that day on, Parks refused to ride a bus where Blake was the driver. She later said, that she had been boycotting the bus lines for over a decade before the official Montgomery boycott started.
On Dec. 1, 1955, she boarded a bus around 6 p.m. Central Standard Time, as she was leaving work for the day. She hadn’t recognized Blake she would later say. However, the bus began to fill up with white passengers. Even though she was in the “colored” section, Blake had told her and three other black passengers they had to move moving the sign behind Parks.
The other black passengers moved to the back of the bus, but Parks moved to the window seat refusing to give up her seat. “I thought of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African American who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955, after being accused of offending a white woman in her family’s grocery store, whose killers were tried and acquitted—and I just couldn’t go back,” she said.
Till, 14, had been lynched in killed on Aug. 28 of that year and his killers, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milliam, had been acquitted in a trial just a few months earlier in September. They would later admit the crime in a Look magazine interview published in 1956.
Parks, who was only 42 at the time, wrote in her book My Story, there is a myth that she had been very physically tired and even older than she actually was. “No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in,” she wrote.
Parks was later arrested under violation of the city code. She was bailed out of jail later that night by Edgar Nixon, president of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP. Her husband, Raymond, was a member of the organization when they got married and Parks joined and was involved in civil rights activism.
She said after that arrest on Dec. 1, 1955, she refused to go through that public humiliation again. Nixon and other members of the Montgomery community through meetings at churches unanimously agreed to boycott the Montgomery bus lines, putting a major strain on the transportation as it received about 75 percent of their revenues from black people in the area. The boycott lasted 381 days before the bus lines were integrated.
Parks was available for a photo for the news story when the buses became integrated on Dec. 21, 1956. But the case put a financial strain on both Parks and her husband. They both lost their jobs and Parks traveled around speaking of the case. However, she left Alabama for Hampton, Va. in 1957 because her and Raymond had been receiving death threats. Parks also disagreed with other civil right leaders, including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., on how to proceed with the civil rights movement there.
She found work as a hostess at an inn at Hampton Institute, a historically black college. Then, they would move to Detroit in 1957 as it was more progressive. She would live there for the rest of her life passing away on Oct. 24, 2005 at the age of 92. Parks had been a widow since 1977 and never had children as well as outliving her siblings. It was later revealed years after she passed that fellow Detroit resident and businessman Mike Ilitch had quietly paid the rent on the apartment where Parks lived. Ilitch had founded Little Caesars and had been an owner of the Detroit Red Wings and the Detroit Tigers.
Parks spent her years in Detroit as an activist for segregation in housing as well as for political prisoners in America. The boycott, along with the murder of Till and the decision of his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley to have a photograph of his bruised, mangled face taken for publication helped bring civil rights into the homes of millions of people who were unaware of the violence and oppression black people were experiencing every day in America in some parts of the country.
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