Topical Tens: 4 February: Rosa Parks

Sunday 4 February 2018

4 February: Rosa Parks

Rosa Parks was born on this date in 1913, 105 years ago. She is known as the black woman who refused to give up her seat to a white person on a bus in 1955. The actual bus, a No. 2857 (a GM "old-look" transit bus, serial number 1132), is now on display in the Henry Ford Museum.

She wasn't the first black person to refuse to give up a seat. There had been several others before her, but activists reckoned she was the best candidate to see through a court case because she was happily married, had a steady job and was a calm, dignified person.
She'd had a run in with that particular Bus driver before. His name was James F. Blake, and he was known for treating black passengers badly. In 1943, she'd got on his bus and paid her fare. When she went to sit down he told her she had to get out of the bus and get on again via the rear entrance. When she complied, he drove off before she could get back on. Rosa vowed she would never again get on a bus if she saw that he was driving. She wrote in her autobiography that she would never have got on the bus on that fateful day in 1955 if she had been paying attention and had noticed who the driver was.
She was already an activist at the time of the bus incident. She had been a member of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP since 1943, and was its secretary. Not that she'd particularly wanted that role - she'd got it because she was the only woman there at the time, and the men considered the role of secretary to be a woman's job. At the time, she said, she was too timid to say no, and held the position until 1957. She did a good job - NAACP leader Edgar Nixon, who generally maintained that women belonged in the kitchen, said of her, "I need a secretary and you are a good one."
Rosa Parks was born Rosa Louise McCauley in Tuskegee, Alabama. Her mother was a teacher and her father a carpenter. As well as African-American ancestry, her great grandparents included a Scottish Irish man and a Native American slave.
It was in her school days that Rosa first noticed white and black people were treated differently. There was a bus to take the white kids to school but the black kids had to walk. At that time, she merely accepted it as the way things were.
She dropped out of school to care for her grandmother when she became ill, but went back to school in 1933, encouraged by her husband, barber and NAACP member Raymond Parks, to finish her high school education. Less than 7% of African-American women completed their high school diplomas in those days.
She was arrested for disorderly conduct and violating a local ordinance. She was fined $10, plus $4 in court costs. She appealed her conviction. She had a lot of support from local black churches, which helped spread the word about the bus boycott which followed. It was intended to last a day, in which no black person would use the buses in Montomery, but the black community decided to carry on until they were treated with respect, and black bus drivers were hired.
As a member of the executive board of directors of the group organising the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Rosa was arrested for a second time in 1956, along with 114 others, for violating a state law against organised boycotting.
Rosa Parks wrote two books and appeared on TV in her later years. Her books were Rosa Parks: My Story, an autobiography for younger readers, about her life leading to her decision to keep her seat on the bus, and Quiet Strength, a memoir focusing on her faith. Her cameo TV appearance was in the television series Touched by an Angel in 1999.
She died of natural causes on October 24, 2005, at the age of 92. As a tribute, City officials in Montgomery and Detroit announced that the front seats of city buses would be left empty and have black ribbons tied on them until her funeral. She was the first woman and the second black person to lie in honour in the Capitol in Washington DC. Her coffin was carried there on a bus similar to the one on which she'd made her protest. Her funeral service was seven hours long.