Parks was arrested on December 1, 1955, after she refused to give up her seat on a crowded bus to a white passenger.
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Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton returned to Alabama for a tribute to Rosa Parks and the lawyers behind the Montgomery Bus Boycott on Tuesday.
As more white people got on and the seats filled up, he asked her to give up her seat and she refused. In 1956, the Supreme Court ruled to ban segregation on public buses.
It’s the 60th anniversary of Rosa’s iconic bus protest that initiated the Civil Rights Movement, and we have 5 things you need to know about Rosa right here!
Contrary to some reports, Parks wasn’t physically exhausted and was able to leave her seat. Rosa Parks may have been weary, but she risked physical abuse, arrest and jail not because she had worked a full day and was exhausted, but because she was part of a growing movement of African Americans sick and exhausted of discrimination and racism. At the time of her arrest, she was a secretary of the local NAACP chapter, and the previous summer she had attended a workshop for social and economic justice at Tennessee’s Highlander Folk School. “I welcome Black Lives Matter”, he said.
Montgomery Mayor Todd Strange said it’s hard for the city to come up with the $3 million it steers to the bus system each year.
Parks was fined $14 U.S. for refusing the bus driver’s order to move to the back of the bus.
She attended many meetings with city officials where concerns about bus segregation were aired, but the discussions reportedly did not spur any change.
According to CNN, Parks died in 2005 at the age of 92.
The Montgomery bus boycott continued for 381 days.
Parks went on to say that she decided in that moment that what she could do to help the cause was not move from the seat.
A new, twenty-six-year-old Baptist preacher in town named Martin Luther King, Jr. had recently assumed the pulpit of the Dexter Avenue Church.
Fifteen bus routes crisscross the city, where tourist attractions herald Montgomery’s dual role as the birthplace of the Confederacy and the civil rights movement. It was grueling hard work, walking long miles in rain and ice or steaming heat, taking in fewer wages, organizing auto pools, suffering through the emotional and physical bullying of many whites.
Often portrayed as a humble, ordinary working woman who was simply “tired of giving in”, Parks was already politically advanced.
“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.
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Spokesmen said the boycott would continue until people who rode buses were no longer “intimidated, embarrassed and coerced”.
