Sixty years after Rosa Parks, Clinton urges racial justice

A black woman has been arrested by police in Montgomery, Alabama, after refusing to give up her seat on the bus to a white person.

Parks was the secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s Montgomery chapter for years before she took her seat on that bus.

Although Parks is widely known, she actually wasn’t the first to refuse to give up her seat in Montgomery. After going through lower levels of the court system, the Supreme Court on November 13, 1956, ruled that segregated buses were unconstitutional.

“On the 60th anniversary of her courageous act, DART salutes Rosa Parks, whose quiet strength made a seat available for everyone”, the sign says.

Rosa attended a segregated, one-room school, which often lacked school supplies and was forced to walk the long route to school while her white peers were offered bus transportation.

FILE – Rosa Parks, left, who was fined $10 and court costs for violating Montgomery’s segregation ordinance for city buses, makes bond for appeal to Circuit Court, Dec. 5, 1955. “There is something profoundly wrong when African American men are far more likely to be stopped and searched by police, charged with crimes, and sentenced to longer prison terms for doing the same thing as a white man”, she said. He called out for the four black passengers in Parks’s row to move to the back, where they would have to stand.

“Parks held no elected office”.

She was arrested under the Jim Crow laws and convicted in a 30 minute trial.

Other events will explore the significance of lawyers in the civil rights movement and the legacy of activist E.D. Nixon as an “unsung hero” of the boycott.

Bus tours, lectures and youth-oriented summits this week to commemorate the boycott’s 60th anniversary include efforts to spotlight less prominent players who worked alongside the famed leaders of the protest. She spoke at the historic Alabama church once pastored by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. “I was forty-two. No, the only exhausted I was, was exhausted of giving in”.

When she passed away at the age of 92 in 2005, Congress voted to have Parks honored by having her coffin at the Capitol Rotunda for a public viewing. Parks refused and was promptly arrested and the rest is history.

“He does not believe that we should just open the borders and let people come in from the south or come in from Syria so I think that will be a major topic that’s on everyone’s mind right now”. “And as a result of that, it ended up with people all over the country seeing that if 40,000 African Americans in Montgomery could solve their problems on the buses by coming up with a plan and working together, then maybe we can do it too”.