Rosa Parks 

Each of the women we have looked at so far has been through the particular lens of what they did to help the advancement of women in society and as a gender. However, as we move from story to story, it is important to remember that these women were not just fighting for women’s equality, but for equality for everyone, which was exactly what Rosa Parks did on December 1st, 1955. 

On this legendary date, Rosa Parks refused to move to a different seat on a municipal segregated bus so that a white man could sit in her place. She, along with 3 other African Americans, were seated in the “colored” section of the locomotive when the man got on. Because there were no more seats in the “white” section, the bus driver asked Parks and the three others to move back in order to create another “white” row. Clearly, Parks refused. Later in her autobiography she said this about that decision : “People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true. I was not tired physically… No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”

This incredible moment was the spark of the famous Montgomery Bus Boycott, in which hundreds of black men and women in Alabama refused to take the municipal buses for 381 days, instead opting for taxis, carpooling, and walking to work and school. Parks not only became one of the faces of the civil rights movement, but also a national hero. The Montgomery Bus Boycott also was the beginning of a new civil rights organization: The Montgomery Improvement Association, with its president being a minister with a famous speech about a dream. 

 

However, things would never be the same for either of who we call “national heroes” today. Both Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. would receive thousands of death threats through the entirety of their lives. Parks was unable to find work in the immediate months after her arrest, but eventually was hired as the Secretary to U.S. Representative John Conyers. In this position, she was able to work closely with the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) and the Black Power Movement. She also remained a strong advocate for the defense of political prisoners and desegregating housing in the United States. 

While Rosa Parks was not the first African American citizen to refuse to give up her bus seat for a White citizen, the activism that sparked because of her decision to fight is why it is such a remembered event. Rosa Parks saw an opportunity to use a terrible event in a positive way being the spark that lit the fuse for the firework that was (and is) the civil rights movement. Along with this singular action, she also continued her activism in both social and political ways, using her voice to try to make the world a better and more equal place. Rosa Parks didn’t just fight for herself that day on the bus, she fought for her people. 

References 

History.com Editors. “Rosa Parks.” History.com, A&E Television Networks, 9 Nov. 2009, https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/rosa-parks.

Shen, Ann. “Rosa Parks.” Bad Girls throughout History: 100 Remarkable Women Who Changed the World, Chronicle Books, San Francisco, 2016, pp. 140–141.