The "A Woman Named Rosa Parks" Story

 It was an ordinary day.  Except for a young woman named Rosa Parks who on December 1, 55 years ago, was seated on a Montgomery city bus that had a movable sign that hung from a seat designating which sections of the bus were for "whites" and which sections were for "colored."  After one stop, a few too many "whites" entered the bus and bus driver, James Blake, walked back the aisle and moved the sign behind where Rosa was seated.  He looked at her and demanded she and other African-American riders move behind the sign.  But, she had been denigrated one too many times in the past few years and she refused to move.  So, Mr. Blake called the police who arrested her for violating the city's segregation laws.  Rosa had been part of a communal effort by many Montgomery women to challenge the city's history of sexual as well as racial violence and that evening in December she had experienced one too many demands to move to the back of the bus.  She was arrested that evening for her commitment to justice and equality.  And, that particular evening, over 55 years ago, Rosa Parks became a hero too many.  

A young Rosa Parks

Rosa was born in 1913 in Tuskegee, Alabama and was raised by her mother's parents in Pine Level, Alabama.  She was a member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church which had been founded about 100 years earlier and which had produced Denmark Vesey who had been a slave revolt leader in Charleston, South Carolina.  Rosa's mother was a schoolteacher and Rosa attended various African-American schools including Montgomery Industrial School for Girls as well as the Alabama State Teachers College before dropping out of school to care for both her mother and grandmother.  Her time as a caregiver didn't go easy and she reported staying up late some nights with her grandfather as he sat with a shotgun as the Ku Klux Klan rode near the family farm.  The Montgomery Industrial School where she went to school was burned twice by white supremacist arsonists, once just a year before she enrolled in the school.  At the age of 19 she married Raymond Parks, a Montgomery barber, who helped her join the NAACP.  It was the same year that the NAACP defended the Scottsboro Boys, nine African-American teenagers falsely accused of raping two white women on a train in March of 1931.  Raymond Parks led a fundraising effort in Montgomery in support of the boys as well as introducing Rosa to the organization.  Parks received support from the NAACP in her stand for violating a local ordinance when she refused to go to the back of the bus.  The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. called Rosa Parks "one of the finest citizens of Montgomery."  The bus boycott in this case lasted 381 days.  The effects of the case took a toll on Rosa and her husband and they eventually moved to Hampton, Virginia where Rosa worked at Hampton Institute and then to Detroit where she and her husband encountered housing discrimination.  She became a leader in housing  discrimination while working with John Conyers whom she supported in his 1964 campaign for Congress.  After winning the post, he hired Rosa as a secretary in his Detroit office.  She remained there until retirement in 1988.  She did stay busy in her fight against inequality.  Her husband Raymond Parks died in 1977 and in 1980 she co-founded the Rosa L. Parks Scholarship Foundation to fund college-bound high school seniors in the Detroit area as well as throughout Michigan.  

The Rosa Parks I remember.

In 1987 she and her lifelong friend Elaine Eason Steele founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development which offered young people "Pathways to Freedom" bus tours of civil rights, Underground Railroad and other historic sites across the country.  She published two autobiographies in the 1990s.  In 2004, Rosa was diagnosed with progressive dementia and died the following year on October 24, 2005.  Three days after her death, all of the city buses in Montgomery and Detroit reserved their front seats with black ribbons in her honor, and remained this way until Rosa was put into her final resting place.  She was one amazing woman!  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.