Today we remember the woman and American civil rights heroine who was Rosa Parks. As the news notes, Rosa Parks, whose act of civil disobedience in 1955 inspired the modern civil rights movement, died Monday in Detroit, Michigan.
She was 92.
Parks’ moment in history began in December 1955 when she refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama.
Her arrest triggered a 381-day boycott of the bus system by blacks that were organized by a 26-year-old Baptist minister, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
The boycott led to a court ruling desegregating public transportation in Montgomery, but it wasn’t until the 1964 Civil Rights Act that all public accommodations nationwide were desegregated.
Facing regular threats and having lost her department store job because of her activism, Parks moved from Alabama to Detroit in 1957. She later joined the staff of U.S. Rep. John Conyers, a Michigan Democrat.
Conyers, who first met Parks during the early days of the civil rights struggle, recalled Monday that she worked on his original congressional staff when he first was elected to the House of Representatives in 1964.
Even as we note this aspect of her biography and work, it is important to note that Rosa Parks would have been aware of and would have appreciated the vitally important influence of her attitude and personality.
Of note is the fact that the late, great, and to-this-day extremely revered, Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once unburdened himself of a highly valued truism to the effect that “a man can’t ride your back unless it’s bent.”
His contemporary and comrade in arms -Mrs. Rosa Parks- would have known and appreciated the gravity and importance of what this Christian soldier was saying to her, their fellow country men and the world.
Reverend King -as we know- became a Christian martyr for his beliefs and his advocacy on behalf of his people.
And from one perspective, the times that shaped both Dr. King and Rosa Parks were kinder to her. She was able to live -as the old saying goes- until she died. There was to be no premature or abbreviated full stop for this matriarch of the Civil Rights Movement.
She died this Monday past at the very ripe age of 92.
As we learn, she was born Rosa Louise McCauley in Tuskegee, Alabama, on February 4, 1913. Her marriage to Raymond Parks lasted from 1932 until his death in 1977.
We understand that Parks’ father, James McCauley, was a carpenter, and her mother, Leona Edwards McCauley, a teacher.
Before her arrest in 1955, Parks was active in the voter registration movement and with the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, where she also worked as a secretary in 1943.
At the time of her arrest, Parks was 42 and on her way home from work as a seamstress.
She took a seat in the front of the black section of a city bus in Montgomery.
“The driver wanted us to stand up, the four of us. We didn’t move at the beginning, but he says, ‘Let me have these seats.’ And the other three people moved, but I didn’t,” she once said.
She added, “I only knew that, as I was being arrested, that it was the very last time that I would ever ride in humiliation of this kind.”
Four days later, Parks was convicted of disorderly conduct and fined $14.
That was not to be the end of the matter. A mass movement was birthed as a long-suffering people that had ‘bent its back’ decided to take a stand for freedom.
As the record reveals, the mass movement marked one of the largest and most successful challenges of segregation and helped catapult Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to the forefront of the civil rights movement.
The rest of that story was the stuff of which legends are made. It reverberates and resounds from that time to now.
Editorial from The Bahama Journal
