Letras

Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott

As many know racism has been a very big issue in this country ever since anyone can remember, and before the civil rights movement things were tough for African Americans all over the United States. They were denied the rights that many White citizens had and it was humiliating and hard for many of them. But this all began to take a drasticchange when a woman by the name of Rosa Parks decided to make stand, she was a strong minded woman who is the long lived mother of the freedom movement. She became part of a bus incident that would lead to the beginning of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which lasted 382 days; Mrs. Parks had started a revolution that would one day change the world.
To many people Rosa Parks was said to be the initialPioneer of the Civil Rights Era which at the time was causing mounds and loads of controversy and mayhem. An Interview established by The Academy of Achievement asked Mrs. Parks a number of very important questions dating back to the day when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man in a Montgomery Bus. She triggered the policeman to arrest her after she kept refusing to stand up, andwas arrested on December 1st 1955. She was taken down to the nearby police station, and right after that the bus driver was asked to go down to city hall to sign a warrant against Mrs. Parks. As soon as it was all announced people began to take part of the cause to help Rosa Parks, one of the Chairman of the NAACP helped her by calling a number of ministers for help. Her trial was on December5th, and they found her guilty. With the help of some Lawyers that were representing Mrs. Parks filed an appeal, and she didn’t have to pay any fine at all, she then held a big meeting where she told everybody about her experience in the bus on the day of the incident, and the

people immediately took that in mind. They stopped riding the bus for a long period of time and that caused a lot ofattention to the public. Mrs. Parks said,” I was arrested on a Thursday evening, and on Friday Evening is when they had the meeting at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where Dr. Martin Luther King was the pastor. A number of citizens came and I told them the story and from then on, it became news about me being arrested. My trial was December 5th, when they found me guilty. The lawyers Fred Gray andCharles Langford, who represented me, filed an appeal and, of course, I didn’t pay any fine. We set a meeting at the Holt Street Baptist Church on the evening of December 5th; because December 5th was the day the people stayed off in large numbers and did not ride the bus. In fact, most of the buses, I think all of them were just about empty with the exception of maybe very, very few people. Whenthey found out that one day’s protest had kept people off the bus, it came to a vote and unanimously, it was decided that they would not ride the buses anymore until changes for the better were made”.(http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/par0int-1)

Official Records state that Rosa Parks was originally born as Rosa Louise McCauley, her mother and father raised her in Tuskegee, Alabama. Laterin life she moved with her grandparents to a farm, and then began to attend a private school founded by liberal minded woman. She graduated and attended college; she then settled in Montgomery and got married to Raymond Parks. They grouped people together to start the NAACP to help the lives of African Americans in the segregated south. The day of the bus incident created the MontgomeryImprovement Association, who was being organized by Martin Luther King, Jr. The supreme court took the people’s actions in place and outlawed racial segregation on all public transportation. “I worked on numerous cases with the NAACP,”Mrs. Parks recalled, “but we did not get the publicity.

There were cases of flogging, peonage, murder, and rape. We didn’t seem to have too many successes. It was more...