US mourns hero who made stand by sitting
Published: October 25, 2005
THE US is mourning Rosa Parks, the black seamstress who ignited the civil rights struggle by refusing to give up her bus seat for a white man.
The “mother of the civil rights movement” died, aged 92, at her home in Detroit of natural causes.
On December 1, 1955, Parks was jailed and fined $US14 for refusing to give up her seat in the middle of the bus to a white man.
Front rows were for whites only and blacks had to leave their seats in other rows when all front-row seats were taken and whites were left standing.
Speaking in 1992, she said history too often maintained “that my feet were hurting and I didn’t know why I refused to stand up when they told me. But the real reason of my not standing up was I felt that I had a right to be treated as any other passenger. We had endured that kind of treatment for too long.”
African-American leaders in Montgomery, Alabama’s profoundly segregated capital, were eager to launch a black boycott of city buses to lift the city law barring blacks from sitting with whites.
Her arrest launched a 382-day Montgomery bus boycott that ran from December 5, 1955, to December 20, 1956.
In that time, black workers walked to their jobs or paid drivers of black-owned taxis the same amount as the bus fare to get to work.
The protest ended after the US Supreme Court ruled on November 13, 1956, segregation on buses was unconstitutional.
That ruling encouraged others to seek an end to racial injustice around the country.
The boycott was led by the Rev Martin Luther King Jr, then a 27-year-old Baptist minister, who went on to become a national civil rights figure and Nobel peace prize winner.
Parks lost her job as a result of the protests.
In 1957, she moved to Detroit, Michigan, and remained active in the civil rights movement.
From 1967-88, she worked on the Detroit staff of Democratic Congressman John Conyers.
In 1996, president Bill Clinton awarded Parks the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honour, bestowed upon individuals who have made important contributions to the country.
She received the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People’s Spingarn Medal in 1979 for her achievements in civil rights.
In her autobiography, Rosa Parks: My Story, she stressed being work weary had nothing to do with remaining seated.
“The only tired I was was tired of giving in.”
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