Parks, Rosa 92, Founding Symbol of Civil Rights
Movement, Dies
Author: E. R. SHIPP
NATIONAL | October 25, 2005
Rosa Parks, a black seamstress whose refusal to
relinquish her seat to a white man on a city bus in
Montgomery, Ala., almost 50 years ago grew into a mythic event
that helped touch off the civil rights movement of the
1950's and 1960's, died yesterday at her home in
Detroit. She was 92 years old.
Her death was confirmed by Dennis W. Archer, the
former mayor of Detroit.
For her act of defiance, Mrs. Parks was arrested,
convicted of violating the segregation laws and fined $10,
plus $4 in court fees. In response, blacks in
Montgomery boycotted the buses for nearly 13 months while
mounting a successful Supreme Court challenge to the Jim
Crow law that enforced their second-class status on the
public bus system.
The events that began on that bus in the winter of
1955 captivated the nation and transformed a 26-year-old
preacher named Martin Luther King Jr. into a major
civil rights leader. It was Dr. King, the new pastor of
the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, who was
drafted to head the Montgomery Improvement
Association, the organization formed to direct the nascent civil
rights struggle.
"Mrs. Parks's arrest was the precipitating factor
rather than the cause of the protest," Dr. King wrote in
his 1958 book, "Stride Toward Freedom. "The cause lay
deep in the record of similar injustices."
Her act of civil disobedience, what seems a simple
gesture of defiance so many years later, was in fact a
dangerous, even reckless move in 1950's Alabama. In
refusing to move, she risked legal sanction and perhaps
even physical harm, but she also set into motion
something far beyond the control of the city authorities.
Mrs. Parks clarified for people far beyond Montgomery the
cruelty and humiliation inherent in the laws and
customs of segregation.
That moment on the Cleveland Avenue bus also turned a
very private woman into a reluctant symbol and
torchbearer in the quest for racial equality and of a
movement that became increasingly organized and sophisticated
in making demands and getting results.
"She sat down in order that we might stand up," the
Rev. Jesse Jackson said yesterday in an interview from
South Africa. "Paradoxically, her imprisonment opened
the doors for our long journey to freedom."
Even in the last years of her life, the frail Mrs.
Parks made appearances at events and commemorations,
saying little but lending the considerable strength of her
presence. In recent years, she suffered from dementia,
according to medical records released during a lawsuit
over the use of her name by the hip-hop group
OutKast.Over the years myth tended to obscure the truth about
Mrs. Parks. One legend had it that she was a cleaning
woman with bad feet who was too tired to drag herself
to the rear of the bus. Another had it that she was a
"plant" by the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People.
The truth, as she later explained, was that she was
tired of being humiliated, of having to adapt to the
byzantine rules, some codified as law and others passed
on as tradition, that reinforced the position of blacks
as something less than full human beings.
"She was fed up," said Elaine Steele, a longtime
friend and executive director of the Rosa and Raymond Parks
Institute for Self Development. "She was in her 40's.
She was not a child. There comes a point where you
say, 'No, I'm a full citizen, too. This is not the way I
should be treated.' "
In "Stride Toward Freedom," Dr. King wrote, "Actually
no one can understand the action of Mrs. Parks unless
he realizes that eventually the cup of endurance runs
over, and the human personality cries out, 'I can take
it no longer.' "
Mrs. Parks was very active in the Montgomery
N.A.A.C.P. chapter, and she and her husband, Raymond, a barber,
had taken part in voter registration drives.
At the urging of an employer, Virginia Durr, Mrs.
Parks had attended an interracial leadership conference at
the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tenn., in the
summer of 1955. There, she later said, she "gained
strength to persevere in my work for freedom, not just
for blacks but for all oppressed people."
But as she rushed home from her job as a seamstress at
a department store on Dec. 1, 1955, the last thing on
her mind was becoming "the mother of the civil rights
movement," as many would later describe her. She had
to send out notices of the N.A.A.C.P.'s coming election
of officers. And she had to prepare for the workshop
that she was running for teenagers that weekend.
"So it was not a time for me to be planning to get
arrested," she said in an interview in 1988.
On Montgomery buses, the first four rows were reserved
for whites. The rear was for blacks, who made up more
than 75 percent of the bus system's riders. Blacks
could sit in the middle rows until those seats were
needed by whites. Then the blacks had to move to seats in
the rear, stand or, if there was no room, leave the
bus. Even getting on the bus presented hurdles: If whites
were already sitting in the front, blacks could board
to pay the fare but then they had to disembark and
re-enter through the rear door.
For years blacks had complained, and Mrs. Parks was no
exception. "My resisting being mistreated on the bus
did not begin with that particular arrest," she said.
"I did a lot of walking in Montgomery."
After a confrontation in 1943, a driver named James
Blake ejected Parks Mrs. from his bus. As fate would
have it, he was driving the Cleveland Avenue bus on Dec.
1, 1955. He demanded that four blacks give up their
seats in the middle section so a lone white man could
sit. Three of them complied.
Recalling the incident for "Eyes on the Prize," a 1987
public television series on the civil rights movement,
Mrs. Parks said: "When he saw me still sitting, he
asked if I was going to stand up and I said, 'No, I'm
not.' And he said, 'Well, if you don't stand up, I'm
going to have to call the police and have you arrested.' I
said, 'You may do that.' "
Her arrest was the answer to prayers for the Women's
Political Council, which was set up in 1946 in response
to the mistreatment of black bus riders, and for E. D.
Nixon, a leading advocate of equality for blacks in
Montgomery.
Blacks had been arrested, and even killed, for
disobeying bus drivers. They had begun to build a case around
a 15-year-old girl's arrest for refusing to give up
her seat, and Mrs. Parks had been among those raising
money for the girl's defense. But when they learned that
the girl was pregnant, they decided that she was an
unsuitable symbol for their cause.
Mrs. Parks, on the other hand, was regarded as "one of
the finest citizens of Montgomery - not one of the
finest Negro citizens - but one of the finest citizens of
Montgomery," Dr. King said.
While Mr. Nixon met with lawyers and preachers to plan
an assault on the Jim Crow laws, the women's council
distributed 35,000 copies of a handbill that urged
blacks to boycott the buses on Monday, Dec. 5, the day of
Mrs. Parks's trial.
"Don't ride the buses to work, to town, to school, or
anywhere on Monday," the leaflet said.
On Sunday, Dec. 4, the announcement was made from many
black pulpits, and a front-page article in The
Montgomery Advertiser, a black newspaper, further spread the
word.
Some blacks rode in carpools that Monday. Others rode
in black-owned taxis that charged only the bus fare,
10 cents. But most black commuters - 40,000 people -
walked, some more than 20 miles.
At a church rally that night, blacks unanimously
agreed to continue the boycott until these demands were
met: that they be treated with courtesy, that black
drivers be hired, and that seating in the middle of the bus
go on a first-come basis.
The boycott lasted 381 days, and in that period many
blacks were harassed and arrested on flimsy excuses.
Churches and houses, including those of Dr. King and Mr.
Nixon, were dynamited.
Finally, on Nov. 13, 1956, in Browder v. Gayle, the
Supreme Court outlawed segregation on buses. The court
order arrived in Montgomery on Dec. 20; the boycott
ended the next day. But the violence escalated: snipers
fired into buses as well as Dr. King's home, and bombs
were tossed into churches and into the homes of
ministers.
Early the next year, the Parkses left Montgomery for
Hampton, Va., largely because Mrs. Parks had been
unable to find work, but also because of disagreements with
Dr. King and other leaders of the city's struggling
civil rights movement.
Later that year, at the urging of her younger brother,
Sylvester, Mrs. Parks, her husband and her mother,
Leona McCauley, moved to Detroit. Mrs. Parks worked as a
seamstress until 1965, when Representative John
Conyers Jr. hired her as an aide for his Congressional
office...