60 years after boycott, using Montgomery bus can be trying

The NAACP has also tried to challenge the laws on segregation in the courts and Mrs Parks has been involved in raising money to defend a 15-year-old student, Claudette Colvin, who was removed from a bus in March of this year for refusing to give up her seat to a white man. Her arrest on December 1, 1955 sparked the 381-day Montgomery bus boycott.

The boycott ended 385 days after the incident when the Supreme Court struck down the Alabama and Montgomery laws as being in violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Today marks the 60th anniversary of Rosa Parks’ decision to sit down for her rights on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus, putting the effort to end segregation on a fast track.

“Rosa Parks reminds us that there is always something we can do”, Mr. Obama said in a statement. MIA would elect Montgomery newcomer Martin Luther King would to lead the local Baptist church.

On advice to young people:

The advice I would give any young person is, first of all, to rid themselves of prejudice against other people and to be concerned about what they can do to help others.

A collection of documents from Ms. Parks’s life, now on loan at the Library of Congress, contains a paper bag from the 1990s covered in the elderly civil rights activist’s scrawl that reads “The Struggle Continues” over and over again.

On this day, 60 years ago in Montgomery, Alabama, a 42-year-old woman sat on a bus on her way home from work at around 6pm. Together, they began a boycott. She was secretary of the chapter at the time of her arrest. In 1943, Blake threw Parks off of his bus after she refused to re-enter the vehicle through the back door following paying her fare at the front.

Parks probably never imagined that her coffin would one day be placed in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol building and visited by thousands of mourners.

Though Rosa Parks became a symbol for the civil rights movement, her family suffered significantly after her arrest and were forced to leave Montgomery. Yet sixty years ago today, Rosa Parks changed America. 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.

JIM MCKNIGHT/ASSOCIATED PRESS Rosa Parks is seen in Detroit in May 1971.

A 37¢ stamp in the To Form A More Perfect Union set issued August 30, 2005, commemorates the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott (Scott 3937e).

“I don’t have a auto”, she said, waiting outside a transfer station with mostly African-American riders.