One of the most iconic figures of the 20th century is Rosa Parks, an Alabama woman whose courageous act against Jim Crow tyranny is credited with starting the civil rights movement across America in the 1960s.
What Did Rosa Parks Do?
Despite facing discrimination and very real physical danger, Parks refused to move. This act of defiance sparked the Montgomery bus boycott, a year-long protest that became a pivotal moment in the Civil Rights Movement.
But she did more than that.
As widely known as Parks’s story is, there are some things you may not know. This article will show you some little-known facts about Parks and her fight for freedom and equality in the South.
1. Parks Faced Intimidation As a Youth
Harassment and intimidation was something that Parks came to endure at a young age. In her book, she recalls when the Ku Klux Klan marched outside her door and her grandfather guardedly stood at the entrance.
At school, she was also bullied. “As far back as I remember, I could never think in terms of accepting physical abuse without some form of retaliation if possible,” said in her memoir.
When Was Rosa Parks Born?
Born on February 4, 1913, Parks faced racial injustice from a young age. Her parents were Leona (née Edwards), a teacher, and James McCauley, a carpenter.
As a child, Parks experienced bullying and witnessed the horrors of segregation firsthand. This shaped her commitment to fighting for equality.
2. Others Resisted Montgomery Bus Segregation Before Parks
Other people, namely Claudette Colvin, stood up to bus segregation in Montgomery before Parks did it, but it didn’t spark a movement.
On March 2, 1955 — nine months before Parks — Colvin and three other young African-Americans refused to give up their seat for white patrons on a Montgomery bus.
“It felt like Sojourner Truth was on one side pushing me down, and Harriet Tubman was on the other side of me pushing me down. I couldn’t get up,” Colvin recalled years later.
While others had resisted bus segregation before, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) saw Parks as the ideal candidate to legally challenge Alabama’s segregation laws. With Parks as the ember, the fire that would light the civil rights moment and become a guiding light for change ignited into a societal symbol.
3. Parks Was Inspired By Emmett Till
The violent abduction and murder of Emmett Till greatly affected Parks, who was killed just three months before she decided not to give up her seat on the bus.
At that fateful moment on the bus in Montgomery, Parks’s mind flashed to what had happened in rural Mississippi.
“I thought of Emmett Till — a 14-year-old African American who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955, after being accused of offending a white woman in her family’s grocery store, whose killers were tried and acquitted—and I just couldn’t go back,” she recalled in her memoir.
In her own words, Parks said she wanted to use the bus moment to claim her rights as a human being, something that had been denied to young Emmett.
4. Parks Knew the Bus Driver
Montgomery bus driver James F. Blake was known for giving black woman a hard time. He reportedly drove one black female motorist off the road and exchanged epithets with another.
Parks had boarded a Montgomery public transit bus from the front in 1943 and was accosted then by Blake, who scolded her to obey segregation rules and get off and re-enter the bus from the back door, which was a custom.
When Parks got off that bus that time in 1943, Blake drove off. That event became seared in Parks’s mind whenever she rode public transportation.
It was Blake’s bus, who on December 1, 1955, stopped to pick up Parks, who was at first unaware she was facing the same driver who had drove off and left her on the roadside years earlier.
As the situation unfolded anew in 1955, Parks made up her mind then and there that she was not going to capitulate to segregation. She became unwavering in her belief for justice.
Blake said, “Y’all better make it light on yourselves and let me have those seats.” When Parks refused, Blake followed protocol and contacted the bus company. “I called the company first, just like I was supposed to do,” Blake recalled in a later newspaper interview. “I got my supervisor on the line. He said, ‘Did you warn her, Jim?’ I said, ‘I warned her.’ And he said, and I remember it just like I’m standing here, ‘Well then, Jim, you do it, you got to exercise your powers and put her off, hear?’ And that’s just what I did.”
He drove for the bus company until 1999, when he retired.
5. Other Black People Gave Up Their Seat
Parks was not the only African-American on the bus. At least four black people, including Parks, were aboard the public transportation vehicle.
“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 recalled.
A black man who was seated next to her gave up his seat, she said.
Blake said, “Why don’t you stand up?” Parks replied, “I don’t think I should have to stand up.”
6. Parks Refused To Give Up Her Seat — But Not Because She Was Tired
Parks wanted the world to know that her act of defiance in the face of Jim Crow had nothing to do with physical fatigue on her part.
In her autobiography, Rosa Parks: My Story, Parks said, “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, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was 42. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”
7. She Moved — But Not To The ‘Colored’ Section
Instead of moving to the redesignated colored section, Parks moved, but toward the window seat.
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.'”
When Parks refused to give up her seat again, that’s when Blake contacted the police. When the officers came, Blake then signed the warrant for her arrest, which sparked the Montgomery bus boycott.
8. Parks Not Only Faced Arrest, But Harassment And Lost Her Job
After Parks was arrested and the incident garnered significant press exposure, not only nationally, but internationally, her life changed drastically.
Though hailed as a hero later, Parks’s actions had immediate consequences. She lost her job and endured years of threats and intimidation.
Blacklisted by white employers in Montgomery, Parks and her husband decided to relocate to Detroit, where she worked for in the office of U.S. Congressman John Conyers. In Michigan, Parks became a national figure and gave speeches and published her autobiography.
9. How Did Rosa Parks Die?
On October 24, 2005, Rosa Parks died of natural causes. She was 92 years old. Parks lived in Detroit from 1961 to 1988, staying in a modest flat on the city’s east side.
At her funeral, more than 4,000 people packed Greater Grace Temple in Detroit. Parks’s coffin was draped with an American flag during the seven-hour ceremony.
At the funeral, then-Illinois Senator Barack Obama said, “The woman we honored today held no public office, she wasn’t a wealthy woman, didn’t appear in the society pages. And yet when the history of this country is written, it is this small, quiet woman whose name will be remembered long after the names of senators and presidents have been forgotten.”
Final Word
Rosa Parks’s courage lit a fire in the Black community of Montgomery and caused them to come together to demand equal treatment under the law.
Parks’s individual courage will always be remembered, and the collective action it sparked will go down as the signature moment of a true act of freedom in this country.
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