Sixty years ago today, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a segregated Montgomery, Alabama bus, launching a year long boycott that catapulted the Civil Rights movement in the United States. Fifteen-year-old civil rights activist Claudette Colvin came before Parks in making news for being dragged off a bus and jailed for not giving up her seat, but she was pregnant at the time and the NAACP didn’t think she could get the support of conservatives to spark a movement. First, in the 1946 landmark case, Irene Morgan v. Commonwealth of Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Virginia’s state law segregating public transportation was unconstitutional when applied to interstate bus travel.
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Felicia Bell @RosaParksMuseum, director of the Rosa Parks Museum at Troy University in Montgomery. She specializes in youth-based civil rights litigation and reforming the education and juvenile justice systems.
Rosa Parks, like many black women, was doing domestic work in her late teens.
U.S. President Barack Obama in a statement Tuesday that Park’s “lifetime of activism – and her singular moment of courage – continue to inspire us today”.
When the boycotts ended the next day, it was Rosa Parks who rode one of the first desegregated buses. “People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was exhausted, but that isn’t true”.
Kayla Smith @itsoKAY_LAugh, Birmingham-Southern College student, African-American events chairperson for Cross Cultural, a campus group that promotes cultural diversity and understanding. Social media marked the day and remembered her, with some taking note of the current plight of African-Americans. “I was forty-two. No, the only exhausted I was, was exhausted of giving in”.
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A crowd has slowly been filling the historic church once pastored by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. where Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is set to mark the 60th anniversary of the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
