Public Employee Press

Courage

With a simple act of courage, Rosa Parks sounded a death knell for America’s longstanding Jim Crow apartheid system.

BY DIANE S. WILLIAMS

“No” she said softly.

Her resistance led to arrest and jail and sparked a 382-day boycott that ended with the U.S. Supreme Court declaring Alabama’s bus segregation laws unconstitutional.

“My only concern was to get home after a hard day’s work,” said Rosa Parks, the 42-year-old seamstress whose simple act of courage sounded a death knell for America’s longstanding Jim Crow apartheid system.

Dec. 1, 2005, marks the 50th anniversary of her historic act of civil disobedience. Rosa Parks died Oct. 24 at 92, just six weeks short of that civil rights jubilee.

After paying her fare in front and exiting to reenter through the rear of the bus as required by law, Parks took her seat in the “colored” section. As the bus filled, the driver told Parks and three others to surrender their seats for a white rider. Three acquiesced. Rosa Parks did not.

“I knew someone had to take the first step, and I made up my mind not to move,” she said.
Before that moment of defiance, she had become a civil rights activist and an official of the Montgomery NAACP. She had taken part in voter registration drives and studied political action techniques at the Highlander Folk School in the summer of 1955.

The Ku Klux Klan
Her “No” was an act of incredible personal courage. She knew well that for defying the white establishment she could lose her job or be beaten or killed by terrorist groups like the infamous Ku Klux Klan that for decdades had bullied, raped and lynched black people in America and particularly in the South.

But she, and many of her generation, could stand the humiliation no longer. “Our mistreatment was just not right, and I was tired of it,” Parks said.

Word of her arrest spread overnight, fliers went out the next day, a Friday, and on Monday 40,000 Montgomery African Americans refused to ride the segregated buses. They chose instead to walk or share cabs to and from work.

The boycott, organized by the Montgomery Improvement Association, lasted a year and 18 days. Under the leadership of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., then a young and little-known preacher, the black community united in peaceful protest in support of Rosa Parks and against the systemic wrongful treatment and second-class citizenship forced on African Americans.

The Supreme Court had struck down so-called “separate but equal” schools in 1954. As the world watched Parks’s trial, the issue became bigger than a seat for a weary soul or a fountain to quench parched throats.

“I worked on numerous cases with the NAACP, but we did not get the publicity,” Mrs. Parks recalled. “There were cases of flogging, peonage, murder, and rape. We didn’t seem to have too many successes. It was more a matter of trying to challenge the powers that be, and to let it be known that we did not wish to continue being second-class citizens.”

Many wondered whether the United States — whose wealth was built in large part on centuries of free labor from African slaves and their descendants, and whose laws and institutional disparities in education, employment and ownership after Emancipation continued to deprive people of color of opportunity — would live up to the ideals and promises in its Constitution.

In a historic decision issued Dec. 21, 1956, the Supreme Court struck down the Montgomery law under which Parks had been arrested and outlawed racial segregation in public transportation ­nationwide.
Rosa Parks, Dr. King, the NAACP and the organized boycotters challenged the system and won, starting with “the power of one.” United, their courage led to a victory that set the scene for the Freedom Rides, lunch-counter sit-ins and voter registration campaigns of the 1960s.

Their defiance of unjust law gained new freedoms and civil rights protections for African Americans and improved their country for all races.

Conquering fear
“I have learned over the years that when one’s mind is made up, this diminishes fear. Knowing what must be done does away with fear,” said Parks.

We honor Rosa Parks, a reticent and gentle woman, who is remembered for setting personal interests aside to stand up for what she believed in her heart to be just and true.

In 1996 President Bill Clinton presented Rosa Parks with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She received a Congressional Gold Medal in 1999. She was the first woman in American history to lie in state beneath the dome of the Capitol, an honor usually reserved for presidents of the United States.