Rosa Parks: 60 years after her arrest on a Montgomery bus

Her act of passive resistance ended with Parks’ arrest and helped fuel the Montgomery bus boycott.

She takes two buses every afternoon to get to her job at McDonald’s after spending her mornings studying math and science, the last two tests she must pass to get her GED and start studying for an accounting degree.

As soon as they heard of Parks’ arrest, Women’s Political Committee leader Jo Ann Robinson and veteran trade unionist E. D. Nixon set about mobilising a community-wide boycott of the buses.

Rosa Parks, seamstress at a downtown store, immediately served notice of appeal to circuit court. Hilliard Brooks was shot and killed during an incident in 1950 when he refused to pay the fare and reboard the bus at the rear entrance. Parks refused and was promptly arrested and the rest is history.

She said the number of people imprisoned in the USA and the racial disparities among prisoner statistics are signs of a problem.

Clinton, a practicing Methodist, seemed comfortable at the pulpit as she quoted Psalms – “This is the day the Lord has made”.

“Because Rosa Parks kept her seat, thousands of ordinary commuters walked instead of rode”, Mr. Obama said. “When that white driver stepped back toward us, when he waved his hand and ordered us up and out of our seats, I felt a determination to cover my body like a quilt on a winter night”.

When Bayard Rustin, a draft-resisting communist and Black gay man, arrived in Montgomery in February 1956, his presence sparked immediate controversy, as David Garrow recounts in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Bearing The Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. This led to the United States Supreme Court ruling of desegregation on buses in Montgomery. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld this decision, declaring that all transportation segregation violated the 14th Amendment’s equal treatment clause. Justice is love correcting that which would work against love. When she was scolded by her grandmother for “talking biggity to white folks”, she told her grandma, “I would rather be lynched than live to be mistreated…[and] not be allowed to say ‘I don’t like it'”. It was grueling hard work, walking long miles in rain and ice or steaming heat, taking in fewer wages, organizing vehicle pools, suffering through the emotional and physical bullying of many whites.

“We are going to be recognizing these older foot soldiers and the people’s shoulders that we all stand on today”, Montgomery Mayor Todd Strange told Reuters.

Martin Luther King wrote “Actually, no one can understand the action of Ms Parks unless they realise that eventually the cup of endurance runs over, and the human personality cries out, ‘I can take it no longer'”.