Meanwhile, as Hillary Clinton prepares to deliver the keynote address for today’s 60th anniversary event, Montgomery’s mostly Black, mostly low-income passengers are stuck riding on an inadequate bus system because Alabama is one of four states that refuse to provide tax dollars for public transportation.
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The next day, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the Rev. Ralph Abernathy and a host of other black ministers formed the Montgomery Improvement Association and called for a boycott of Montgomery’s public transit system.
60 years ago Tuesday, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white passenger, sparking the Montgomery Bus Boycott. What started as a one-day boycott went on for more than a year as an estimated 50,000 people carpooled and walked to work, and ended in June 1956 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled bus segregation unconstitutional. Parks was secretary of the local NAACP chapter, and it’s disputed exactly how spontaneous her refusal to move was.
In 1955, Parks, 42, was convicted of disorderly conduct for refusing to give up her seat to a white man. She was fined $14.
Arrested for the act of defiance, Ms. Parks single-handedly sped the demolition of Southern segregation.
“We talked about Rosa Parks”, said Perryman.
The speech was part of an event hosted by the National Bar Association and Tuskegee History Center that focused on the role lawyers played in the bus boycott and civil rights movement.
Bill Armistead is the Co-Chairman for the Rubio campaign in Alabama and he says the Florida Senator will be discussing issues that are concerning Americans including national security…
“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.
Armistead adds that Alabama will be an important state in next year’s primary as it will be the 5th state to hold a primary on March 1st.
“We are all very encouraged to make a difference”, Eller said. “No, the only exhausted I was, was exhausted of giving in”, Parks later said of the incident. “And now more than ever, we need fearless souls”, she said. “She sat up in an area that she was not allowed to which began the actual Civil Rights movement”. Black people were generally too poor to contribute but, in Montgomery, they gave with their feet, grit, and faith. She was promptly arrested and hauled off to jail, photographed and fingerprinted. As she was being arrested, she said, she thought about the unfairness of the practice and those who had died in an attempt to simply have the rights the U.S. Constitution affords them.
Obama, the United States’s first black president, has paid homage to Parks several times throughout his time in the White House.
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“I don’t have a auto”, she said outside the transfer station waiting room, which is full of mostly African-American riders.
