Almost nine months before Rosa Parks’s famous arrest, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin was arrested on a Montgomery bus for refusing to yield her seat to a white passenger.
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Montgomery’s black community rallied behind the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other leaders and staged a successful boycott of the city’s buses that helped ignite the civil rights movement.
They moved to Detroit, Michigan, in hopes of rebuilding their lives and Parks found work as a secretary for U.S. Representative John Conyers.
History came alive inside the Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church Tuesday. “Because they marched, our union is more ideal”.
Clinton says the USA must have an honest conversation “about the larger and deeper inequalities that continue to exist across our country.” .
Clinton cited the need to conduct broad criminal justice reform and to improve voting rights, where she said there was “mischief afoot” in some states where steps have been understood as efforts to make it tougher to register to vote.
MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) – A court test of segregated transportation loomed today following the arrest of a Negro who refused to move to the colored section of a city bus.
This anniversary may be the last major one featuring those who participated in the year-long boycott, said Howard Robinson, an archivist and instructor at Alabama State University, which will host a discussion titled I Was There. Professor Theoharis told TIME that Park’s frustration with the American justice system is the same frustration that motivates Black Lives Matter movement in present day. Right after her arrest, the Montgomery Improvement Association was founded. In a 1995 interview, she said she wasn’t angry about being asked to leave her seat, just resolute.
While her days were spent working as a seamstress, Parks spent her free time becoming involved in civil rights issues and joined the NAACP. The laws required African-Americans to sit in the back of public buses, and to give up those seats in the back to white people if the front seats were full.
It was Rosa Parks vs. a vicious bus driver and an evil system, and it is Rosa Parks we remember today. A longtime member of the NAACP, Parks’s act of defiance became an important symbol of the early stages of the Civil Rights Movement. “We’ve got to change”, Clinton said after referencing her meeting with the mothers of several African-American men shot and killed by law enforcement officers.
“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.
“We’ve gone from a situation where racism is overt in the form of you can’t use this water foundation to there are policies and procedures that just accidentally suspend more black kids than white kids”, said Ebony Howard, Managing Attorney for the Alabama Southern Poverty Law Office.
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“Standing together, walking together, standing up against an oppression against these people for many years and many generations, how could you walk away from a group like that”, said Graetz.
