60th Anniversary of Rosa Parks Refusing to Move on Bus

In South Mississippi, some community activists say as they recognize Rosa Parks, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the many others who participated in the Montgomery Bus Boycott 60 years ago, they can’t overlook the importance of passing on stories of the struggle for Civil Rights from one generation to another.

An often overlooked fact about Parks is that refusing to give up her seat that day was not her first act of protest over Montgomery’s stark segregation laws. The boycott lasted through December 1956, when city was ultimately ordered by the U.S. Supreme Court to integrate its bus system. “Rosa Parks reminds us that there is always something we can do”.

In recent months, she’s met with the families of young black people killed in police shootings and held conversations with Black Lives Matter protesters.

But the bus boycott would have never happened without the actions of Rosa Parks. “There are still injustices perpetrated every day across our country, sometimes in spite of the law, sometimes, unfortunately, in keeping with it”.

Earlier, U.S. Rep. Terri Sewell, the lone Democrat and African American member of Alabama’s congressional delegation, told the crowd “old battles have become new again”.

While her days were spent working as a seamstress, she spent her free time becoming involved in civil rights issues and joined the NAACP.

The event sparked the boycott of Montgomery buses by black Americans to protest segregated seating.

On Dec. 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man on a public bus in Montgomery, Ala. Martin Luther King, Jr. served as pastor at the church between 1954 and 1960, and in 1955 activists organized the bus boycott at the church.

What Parks refused to do that day was to move from the middle section of the bus where both blacks and whites were allowed to sit.

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton called Tuesday for criminal justice reforms and an end to “the era of mass incarceration in America”.

Clinton praised the work of Gray and other civil rights lawyers and pioneers who risked their lives to uproot an entrenched system of segregation and inequality. Some Montgomery bus drivers – who carried guns – would make black people pay in the front, but then re-board them through the back door so they wouldn’t walk by white passengers, the Nation reports. That night 5,000 Negroes overflowed the auditorium and lawn of a church and voted to continue the boycott until the bus line agreed to halt the “intimidation, embarrassment and coercion” of Negro patrons. Parks writes of how her grandmother would warn her about “taking biggety to white folks”, and of how that same grandmother grew angry with her as a child when, after being bullied relentlessly, Rosa picked up a brick to challenge the white bully.