Heroes We Wish are Immortals

tgomery bus boycott. The United States Congress has honored her as "the first lady of civil rights" and "the mother of the freedom movement". Parks became a NAAC

(NAACP) believed that she was the best candidate for seeing through a court challenge after her arrest for civil disobedience in violating Alabama segregation laws, and she helped inspire the Black community to boycott the Montgomery buses for over a year. The

l department store and was secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP. She had recently attended the Highlander Folk School, a Tennessee center for training activists for workers' rights and racial equality. Although widely honored in later years, she also suffered for her act; she was fired from her job, and received death

ngarn Medal, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Congressional Gold Medal, and a posthumous statue in the United States Capitol's National Statuary Hall. Upon her death in 2005, she was the first woman

ly

mothers a part-Native American slave. She was small as a child and suffered poor health with chronic tonsillitis. When her parents separated, she moved with her mother to Pine Level, just outside the state capital, Montgomery. She grew up on a farm with her mat

age of ten, which was unusual, as quilting was mainly a family activity performed when there was no field work or chores to be done. She learned more sewing in school from the age of eleven; she sewed her own "first dress [she] could wear". As a student at the Industrial School f

ite-established Jim Crow laws, passed after Democrats regained control of southern legislatures, racial segregation was imposed in public facilities and retail stores in the South, including public transportation. Bus and t

vel, where school buses took White students to their

we had no choice but to accept what was the custom. The bus was amon

lux Klan marched down the street in front of their house, Parks recalls her grandfather guarding the front door with a shotgun. The Montgomery Industria

k physically. She later said: "As far back as I remember, I could never think in

y ac

of the Scottsboro Boys, a group of Black men falsely accused of raping two White women. Rosa took numerous jobs, ranging from domestic worker to hospital

She later said, "I was the only woman there, and they needed a secretary, and I was too timid to say no." She continued as secretary until 1957. She worked for the local NAACP leader Edgar

ommittee for Equal Justice for Mrs. Recy Taylor", launching what the Chicago Defender called "the strongest campaign for equal justice to be seen in a decade". Parks continued her

ded meetings with her husband. The notorious Scottsboro c

king to her biographer, Parks noted, "You might just say Maxwell opened my eyes up." Parks worked as a housekeeper and seamstress for Clifford and Virginia Durr, a White couple. Politically liberal, the Durrs became her friends. They encouraged—and eventually helped sponsor—Parks in the summer of 1955 to attend

aptist Church in Montgomery that addressed this case, as well as the recent murders of the activists George W. Lee and Lamar Smith. The featured speaker was T. R. M. Howard, a Black civil rights leader from Mississippi who headed the Regional Council of Negro Leadership. Howard brought

est and b

he bus where Parks s

es: law and pr

cording to the law, no passenger would be required to move or give up their seat and stand if the bus was crowded and no other seats were available. Ov

ough Blacks composed more than 75% of the ridership. The sections were not fixed but were determined by placement of a movable sign. Black people could sit in the

"colored" section sign, or remove it altogether. If White people were already sitting in the front, Bla

air. Parks said, "My resistance to being mistreated on the bus did not b

ke told her to follow city rules and enter the bus again from the back door. When Parks exited the vehicl

arks's

ng her February 1956 arrest du

Parks, December

Parks, December

Parks from her arres

sted again, along with 73 other people, after a grand jury indict

6 p.m., Thursday, December 1, 1955, in downtown Montgomery. She paid her fare and sat in an empty seat in the first row of back seats reserv

along its regular route, all of the White-only seats in the bus filled up. The bus reached the third stop in front of the Empire Theater, and

o that the White passengers could sit. Years later, in recalling the events of the day, Parks said, "When that white driver stepped back tow

plied. Parks said, "The driver wanted us to stand up, the four of us. We didn't move at the beginning, but he said, 'Let

d to move to the rear of the bus, "I thought of Emmett Till—a 14-year-old African American who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955, after b

ent for Eyes on the Prize, a 1987 public television series on the Civil Rights Movement, Parks said, "When he saw me still sitting, he asked if I was going to stan

months after her arrest, Parks said she had decided, "I would have to kno

ography, My S

ysically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some peop

hy do you push us around?" She remembered him saying, "I don't know, but the law's the law, and you're under arrest." She later said

ally she had not taken a White-only seat; she had been in a colored section. Edgar Nixon, president of the Montgomery chapt

46, Lillie Mae Bradford in 1951, Sarah Louise Keys in 1952, and the members of the ultimately successful Browder v. Gayle 1956 lawsuit (Claudette Co

ery bus

: Montgomery

about the Parks case. Robinson believed it important to seize the opportunity and stayed up all night mimeographing over 35,

ery Advertiser helped spread the word. At a church rally that night, those attending agreed unanimously to continue the boycott until they were treated

ing found guilty and fined $10, plus $4 in court costs (combined total equivalent to $153 in 2022), Parks appealed her conviction and

e way I felt about being treated in that manner. I had not planned to get arrested. I had plenty to do without having to end up in jail. But when I had to face that decision, I

er 5, 1955—the WPC distributed the

. You can afford to stay out of school for one day. If you work, take a cab, or walk. But please

hers traveled in Black-operated cabs that charged the same fare as the bus, 10 cents (equivalent to $1.0

ategies. At that time, Parks was introduced but not asked to speak, despite a standing ovation and calls from the crowd for her to speak; when sh

name "Montgomery Improvement Association" (MIA).  The name was adopted, and the MIA was formed. Its members elected as their president M

s was considered the ideal plaintiff for a test case against city and state segregation laws, as she was seen as a responsible, mature woman with a good reputation. She was securely married and employed, was regarded as posses

ry continued the boycott for 381 days. Dozens of public buses stood idle for months, severely damaging the bus transit company's finances, until the city repealed its law requiring segregation on public buses following the US Supreme Court ruling in Browder v. Gayle that it

rd Freedom that Parks's arrest was the catalyst rather than the cause of the protest: "The cause lay deep in the record of similar injustices."  He wrote, "Actually, no on

mber 21, 1956, the day they became legally

ctions used against activists, she lost her job at the department store. Her husband lost his job as a barber at Maxwell Ai

sagreed with King and other leaders of Montgomery's struggling civil rights movement about how to proceed, and was constantly

gressive reputation, but Parks encountered numerous signs of discrimination against African-Americans. Schools were effectively segregated, and services in Black neighborhoods substandard. In 1964, Parks told an interv

ptionist for his congressional office in Detroit. She held this position until she retired in 1988. In a telephone interview with CNN on October 24, 2005, Conyers recalled, "You treated her with deference because she was so quiet, so serene—just a very special person ... There was only one Rosa Parks." Doing mu

the Selma-to-Montgomery Marches, the Freedom Now Party, and the Lowndes County Free

ghway construction and urban renewal. By 1962, these policies had destroyed 10,000 structures in Detroit, displacing 43,096 people, 70 percent of them African-American. P

illing of three young men by police during the 1967 Detroit uprising, in what came to be known as the Algiers Motel incident. She also helped form the Virginia Park district council to help rebuild the area. The council facilitated the building of the only B

9

arks c

ttee, and also worked in support of the Wilmington 10, the RNA 11, and Gary Tyler. When Angela Davis was acquitted, Parks introduced her to an audience of 12,000 as a "dear sister who has suffered so much persecutio

pitalization. In spite of her fame and constant speaking engagements, Parks was not a wealthy woman. She donated most of the money from speaking to civil rights causes, and lived o

e learned from a newspaper of the death of Fannie Lou Hamer, once a close friend. Parks suffered two broken bones in a fall on an icy sidewalk, an injury which caused considerable and recurring pain. She

9

seniors, to which she donated most of her speaker fees. In February 1987, she co-founded, with Elaine Eason Steele, the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development, an institute that runs the "Pa

devoted considerable energy to these causes. Unrelated to her activism, Parks loaned quilts of her own

s in

s, which recounts her life leading to her decision to keep her seat on the bus. A few y

nd he attacked her. Hurt and badly shaken, Parks called a friend, who called the police. A neighborhood manhunt led to Skipper's capture and reported beating. Parks was treated at Detroit Receiving Hospital for facial injuries and swelling on the right side of her fac

moved into Riverfront Towers, a secure high-rise apartment building. Learning of Parks's move, L

owed them to have signs stating that this section of highway was maintained by the organization). Since the state could not refuse the KKK's sponsorship, the Missouri legislatu

eries Touched by an Angel. It was her last appearance on scre

0

n by Hartford Memorial Baptist Church in Detroit. When her rent became delinquent and her impending eviction was highly publicized in 2004, executives of the ownership company announced they had forgiven the back rent and would allow Parks, by then 91 and in extremely poor health, to live rent

, moved to his garden in Germany, and partly restored. It served as a museum honoring Rosa Parks. In 2018, the house was moved back to the United States. Brown Un

and

nd her husband never had children and she outlived her only sibling. She was survived by her sister-in-law (Raymond's

can Methodist Episcopal (AME) church, where she lay in repose at the altar on October 29, 2005, dressed in the uniform of a church deaconess. A memorial service was held there the following morning. One of the speakers, United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, said tha

a Parks at the U.

ant) to be honored in this way. She was the first woman and the second Black person to lie in honor in the Capitol. An estimated 50,000 people viewed the caske

t. After the service, an honor guard from the Michigan National Guard draped the U.S. flag over the casket and carried it to a horse-drawn hearse, which was intended to carry it, in daylight, to the cemetery. As the hearse passed the thousands of people who we