Years Ago Today: The Difference Rosa Parks Made

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton claps with attorney Benjamin L. Crump before she speaks during the National Bar Association’s 60th Anniversary of the Montgomery Bus Boycott at the Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala., on December 1.

“We lionise Rosa Parks but to put her in perspective she is a symbol for something larger than just Rosa Parks”, said Robinson of all those who took part in the boycott. Two years ago, he headlined the unveiling of a statue of Parks in the U.S. Capitol. “The incident sparked a year-long boycott of the buses by blacks”. After going through lower levels of the court system, the Supreme Court on November 13, 1956, ruled that segregated buses were unconstitutional.

Regardless, Parks’ stand was a major moment in the fight for racial equality – which we see continuing in today’s Black Lives Matter movement.

Next, in 1955, the Interstate Commerce Commission responded to a bus segregation complaint filed by Sarah Keys. “I consider this a national emergency”.

When a Christian woman of her stature and humility was unjustly treated in that fashion, the leaders – including a 26-year-old Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., whose own church was just a half-mile east of where Parks was arrested – saw an opportunity and made their move.

But Rosa Parks was much more than someone who lived quietly until she hit a breaking point.

“They knew that segregation was a distortion of justice, not an expression of it. They also knew that sometimes lawmakers get it wrong and when that happens, it’s up to lawyers and judges to make it right”.

Parks sought to set the record straight: “People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was exhausted, but that isn’t true”.

“Rosa Parks, a black seamstress, was arrested after refusing to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery city bus”, the Associated Press reports. African Americans in Alabama, and a lot of other places, were not just pressured into giving up their seats on public transportation to white people; they were required by law to do so.

Mary Hunter, 75, dressed in her finest clothes, drove to the capital from Pike Road, Alabama, and stood in line for four hours to enter the church.

FILE – A poster entitled “It All Started On A Bus”, is pasted above the front seat of a New York City bus to honor Rosa Parks in New York, Dec. 1, 2005. She also called for toughening the nation’s gun laws and taking action to protect voting rights against current incursions in Alabama and many other states. She sat down. A short while later, as the bus grew more crowded, she was ordered by the bus driver to move toward the back of the bus to free her seat up for a white person.