Rosa Parks: biography of this activist for civil rights in the USA

On few occasions such a trivial act has become a true act of protest against injustices, in this case against racial segregation. Rosa Parks, a humble black dressmaker, became a symbol for civil rights by refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger, defying an unfair rule.

This caused her to end up arrested and tried and, what could have been just another injustice of the many that the blacks in the 50s, it became a demonstration that demonstrated how African-Americans can destabilize and overthrow a system racist.

Next we will learn about the life trajectory of this reference in the anti-racist struggle, what she did and how she has been widely remembered and decorated since her incident with the bus seat, through a biography of Rosa Parks.

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Short biography of Rosa Parks

Rosa Parks was born Rosa Louise McCauley on February 4, 1913 in Tuskegee, Alabama, United States. Her parents were James, a carpenter, and Leona McCauley, a teacher who would teach little Rosa to read at an early age. When Rosa was only two years old, her parents separated from her, she and her mother moved to the house of her maternal grandparents Rose and Sylvester Edwards in Pine Level.

Her grandparents would be very important to Rosa de ella in her fight against racial inequalities since they were ex-slaves and strong defenders of equality. In addition, Rosa Parks would be marked from her childhood when she witnessed how one day her grandfather had to stand in front of her house with a shotgun while members of the Ku Klux Klan marched down the street.

Being at Pine Level and thanks to the fact that her mother had taught her to read, Rosa Parks was able to attend the local school that, like in most schools in the country, was segregated. The relationship between the white and black students was evident. While the whites had a bus offered by the municipality and could give classes in a new building, blacks had to walk to class and had hardly any equipment to teach quality.

rose she had to leave school when she was 16 years old since her mother and her grandmother became ill and she had to take care of them. Although she could not take them back, she did manage to get a job as a seamstress in a shirt factory in the city of Montgomery. In 1932, at just 19 years old, she married Raymond Parks, a barber by profession and an active member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). It was thanks to Raymond's help from hers that she Rosa could earn her high school degree a year later.

After graduating Rosa Parks became actively involved in the fight for civil rights, her joining the NAACP in 1943 and serving as youth leader and secretary to the association president Edgar Daniel Nixon, a position she held until 1957. The Parks marriage never had children, but what they did have was a very vindictive life together that gave them a very extensive fame within the fight for the rights of African Americans.

Sitting for equality

On December 1, 1955, the event that would change the lives of Rosa Parks and that of thousands of African Americans occurs. That day Rosa Parks would end up arrested for a very simple and trivial fact: not giving up her seat. She did not give it up not because she was tired, but because she was exhausted that whites were treated with privileges to the detriment of blacks. Her legal obligation, although unjust, was to have to cede her seat to those white citizens who so desired.

The Montgomery City Code at the time was clearly racist. It required that all public transportation be segregated and that the drivers of the vehicles had the same powers that a police officer while in charge of the bus, having to enforce the regulations racial. Drivers had to assign separate seats to black and white passengers, delimiting a line in the middle of the bus: whites were in front, African-Americans in the rear.

However, this division could be changed depending on how many targets were on the bus. If the bus was full of white people, those of color were obliged to give up their seat and go further back or stand, which happened on December 1, 1955. The vehicle Rosa Parks was traveling in was filled with whites and the driver told her and three other black passengers to give up their seats. The regulations allowed the driver to call the police in case of refusal.

The other three passengers got up and obeyed the driver, but Parks refused., even knowing what that implied. She was going to stay seated, she was not going to give up her seat because she was black. This brave act would go down in history as one of the most important protests of the 20th century, with a host of social and political repercussions. With her gesture, Rosa Parks was arrested and charged with violating Chapter 6, Section 11, of the Code of the City of Montgomery She was taken to the police headquarters and that same night she was released under bail.

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Bus boycott

A few days later, on December 5, the trial against Rosa Parks took place. The event spread like wildfire and at the entrance of the court a boisterous crowd of 500 people waited for her to support her. On the morning of that day, a group of African-American leaders met at Mount Zion Church in Montgomery to discuss strategies and decide to promote a boycott of the buses. Thus arose the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) which considered that the Rosa Parks case provided the perfect opportunity to initiate real change.

After a 30-minute hearing, Rosa Parks was found guilty of violating local ordinance and sentenced to pay a $ 10 fine along with $ 4 more in court fees. The MIA asked African Americans in Montgomery not to use city buses as an act of protest. As the majority of blacks did not use the bus, the organizers of the protest considered that their strong point should be the time. The longer the boycott lasted, the more pressure would be achieved.

This fine of $ 14, which may seem small to us, was enormously unfair and large both for the reason for which it was put and for the pocket of an African American woman of the 50s. For this reason, the boycott call had a lot of follow-up, causing the city buses to remain empty. The 40,000 black commuters who used to use them decided that, from that moment on, they would go to work on foot, some even having to walk 30 kilometers.

Blacks, so long despised and denied their rights, discovered how their actions could destabilize a racist white society. When they stopped using public buses, many of them were stopped, severely damaging the finances of the transport company. No matter how second-class blacks were, their boycotting of transportation cost transportation and the city of Montgomery gravely.

Naturally many segregationists orchestrated violent reprisals against the black population. African American churches and the homes of Martin Luther King and E. D. Nixon were razed. African Americans also tried to end the boycott, as many of them were already tired of walking long distances to work. Injustices continued to occur, with many blacks arrested on the grounds that a very old-fashioned law was in place that prohibited boycotts.

Legal victory

In response to these harsh reprisals, members of the African American community took legal action, taking the case of segregation in public transportation systems to the United States District Court for the Middle District of Alabama. The person who filed the lawsuit was Rosa Parks' attorney, Fred Gray.

In June 1956 the so-called segregationist "Jim Crow laws" were declared unconstitutional by the District Court. Still, the city of Montgomery appealed the sentence on November 13, 1956, in a clear attempt to move forward with its racist system and repress blacks. Likewise, the United States Supreme Court ruled in favor of Rosa Parks' case, declaring that segregation in transportation was unconstitutional.

The legal ruling together with the financial losses associated with the boycott caused the city of Montgomery will reluctantly lift the segregation enforcement on public buses in December 1956. Thanks to the combination of legal action and the determination of the African American community maintaining their boycott, which lasted 381 days, they managed to move closer to racial equality. By not giving up her seat Rosa Parks she sparked one of the largest and most successful mass movements in American racial history.

After the boycott

After becoming a symbol of the Civil Rights Movement, in addition to achieving widespread fame, Parks could not save herself from being the victim of retaliation. Both she and her husband were fired from their respective jobs and couldn't find a new one in Montgomery, with which they had to leave the city settling in Detroit along with Rosa's mother.

In her new town Rosa Parks she would work as a secretary and receptionist in the congressional office of the United States Representative, John Conyer. She also served on the board of the Family Planning Federation of America. In 1987 she, along with her friend Elaine Eason Steele, founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development.

Death

Rosa Louise McCauley Parks passed away on October 24, 2005 in her apartment in Detroit, Michigan, at the age of 92. her because of a myocardial infarction. The previous year she had been diagnosed with a progressive dementia that she, surely, had been manifesting since 2002. Her death, like the iconic incident at her seat, did not go unnoticed, receiving the attention of all the media and having a resounding funeral.

She was veiled in the Capitol in Washington, where about 50,000 people gathered. She became the first woman and second black person to receive a state burial of this caliber, granted to only 28 people in the history of the United States. Later, she was buried next to her husband and her mother in Detroit's Woodlawn Cemetery. Shortly thereafter, this would become a chapel that would be called Rosa L. Parks Freedom Chapel.

Acknowledgments

Rosa Parks received many awards for her courage and advocacy in favor of equality and the rights of African Americans. In her decorations we find the Spingarn medal, which is the most important award of the NAACP, in addition to the prestigious Martin Luther King Jr. Award. On September 15, 1996 President Bill Clinton presented Parks with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor award that the American executive branch can conceive. The following year she would win the Congressional Gold Medal, offered by the United States legislature.

In 1999, TIME magazine named Parks one of the 20 Most Influential People of the 20th Century. In 2000 Troy University opened the Rosa Parks Museum located in the same place where she was arrested in 1955. On February 4, 2013, the day Rosa Parks would have turned 100, the date was marked by releasing a commemorative stamp from the United States Postal Service called the "Rosa Parks Forever" stamp.. In February of that same year, President Barack Obama inaugurated a statue in his honor on Capitol Hill.

Bibliographic references:

• Beito, David T.; Royster Beito, Linda (2009). Black Maverick: T. R. M. Howard's Fight for Civil Rights and Economic Power. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. pp. 138–39.
• Garrow, David J (1986). Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. ISBN 0-394-75623-1, p. 13.
• Parks, Rosa; James Haskins (1992). Rosa Parks: My Story. Dial Books. p. 116. ISBN 0-8037-0673-1.