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December 1: Rosa Parks arrested in Montgomery
Posted On Dec 01 2015
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PolitickerNJ would like to take a moment to honor the life and legacy of the late Rosa Parks, who in Montgomery, Alabama on December 1st 1955 refused to give up her bus seat in the “colored section” to white passengers: a watershed moment in the Civil Rights movement.
Parks’ courageous act of defiance and the subsequent bus boycott were key events in the U.S civil rights movement. After Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., made a speech at Holt Street Baptist Church asking people to join in the fight against segregation, almost 20,000 passengers boycotted Montgomery’s buses regularly for the 381 days it lasted, and by the end of the boycott – after some bus lines shut down routes to black neighborhoods because they could no longer sustain the costs – more than 40,000 regular riders of the buses were no longer on them.
“I would rather be lynched than live to be mistreated and not be allowed to say “I don’t like it”.”
What is the biggest misconception about Rosa Parks? The state statute authorizes bus companies to provide and enforce separate facilities for whites and Negroes. “If he wanted to kill me and rape a dead body”, Parks wrote, “he was welcome but he would have to kill me first”.
Sixty years later, people are taking to social media to pay respects and thank her. When she refused, Blake summoned the police. In 1950, police officers shot and killed Hilliard Brooks, a World War II veteran, when he boarded a Montgomery bus and wouldn’t move to the back. In March of 1955, nine months before Parks was arrested, Claudette Colvin, then 15, was arrested for refusing to give up her seat. As she was being arrested, she said, she thought about the unfairness of the practice and those who had died in an attempt to simply have the rights the U.S. Constitution affords them.
Parks was asked many times about the motivation for her actions on that day.
When the boycotts ended the next day, it was Rosa Parks who rode one of the first desegregated buses. “The only exhausted I was was exhausted of giving”.
