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Yijie Su
Professor J.Austin
History 22
December 24, 2015

Rosa Parks Timeline
1913- Born on the 4th of February, in Tuskegee, Alabama.
1919 –attends Pine level school.
1924 –attends Miss White’s School.
1928 –attends Booker T. High School.
1929 –attends Alabama State Teachers Negro College.
1943 –refuses to give seat to white supremacist.
1949 –works with NAACP as a secretary.
1977 –husband dies.
1992 –publishes book about her story.
1996 –receives freedom medal from Bill Clinton.
1999 -receives highest civilian honor.
2003 –diagnosed with dementia.
2005 –dies on October 4th

On a frosty December night in 1955, Rosa Parks unobtrusively started an upheaval and the most famous revolution in the United States by simply taking a seat. She felt exhausted after working all day. She was a retail chain worker in the South. She entered a bus that was to take her home and took a fifth column seat. The first line in the fifth column was dedicated to the Colored people. In Montgomery, Alabama, when a vehicle turned out

!2 to be full, the seats closer to the front (near the driver) were dedicated to the white travelers.1
The driver asked Rosa and three other black Americans near her to relocate to the back seats in order to give way to white travelers. After Parks had declined to move, she was put to detention and given a fine of 10 dollars. After her detention, the events that took place changed America significantly. In1955, Martin Luther King was the leader of the Dexter
Baptist Church located in Montgomery. A staunch fan of peace, King and his partner Ralph
Abernathy began an epic campaign to blacklist all of the buses in Montgomery's.
The requests they made were straightforward: black travelers ought to be treated with affability. Seating ought to be dispensed on a first come basis with black and white mixing in the buses. What's more, African-American drivers ought to drive from and to places that comprised both black and white. The boycott became effective in December 5th,
1955.
There is a lot that can be learned from the story of Rosa Parks about the situation in
America back then. There was racial profiling that extended to the use of public transport, and this was to an extent that the failure to comply attracted a fine or jail time. The day after
Rosa Parks' capture, the word went out among Montgomery's African American group. The
Women's Political Council chose to dissent her abuse by arranging a transport boycott the day of Parks' trial. The arrangement was not to keep the campaign just for Rosa; many people in Montgomery's support started the Montgomery Improvement Association to keep boycotting the buses until the divisive laws were changed. The principle target of the boycott was to end their isolation in the Montgomery transportation framework once and for all. Despite the fact that the movement anticipated that the boycott would be a win, it surpassed their most anticipated desires. All of Montgomery's African American people
1

Joyce Ann Hanson, Rosa Parks: A Biography. (Westport, Conn: Greenwood, 2010)

!3 maintained a distance from the buses, chose to walk and take taxicabs, doing carpools, and even riding donkeys to get to where they were going. Frequently, whites declined to be without their black laborers and drove them to and from work.
The standoff went on for about 382 days, costing the transport organization a lot of cash, yet the city declined to give in. The boycott leaders recorded a government petition against Montgomery's segregation laws, to prove that the city disregarded the Fourteenth
Amendment. In 1956, the courts decided that the laws were unlawful; however, the
Montgomery district legal advisors filed an appeal2. The standoff then proceeded until
November of the same year, when the Supreme Court pronounced the segregation laws as unconstitutional. After the Supreme Court choice was formally instituted in Montgomery, the boycott was finished, and the buses of Montgomery were no more racist. On the other hand, Rosa
Parks' refusal to surrender her seat and the yearlong transport standoff had dire results.
Blacks in other southern urban communities understood that if dissent worked in
Montgomery, they could work somewhere else, and they started to challenge isolation in their particular towns. Additionally, due to his part in the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Martin
Luther King Jr. increased his prominence and went up to the front line of the social equality movement. Many of the white population were against the boycott. It undermined the racial state of affairs. What is yet to be uncovered is that some white sympathizers attempted to take an interest in the boycott by giving African-American employees car rides to work. Some say this apparently liberal activity was selfish and childish on the part of whites who needed the work done. Eyewitnesses of the event say that white housewives may have begun this as an

Kristin Kemp,Estadounidenses Asombrosos: Rosa Parks (Amazing Americans: Rosa Parks). Teacher
Created Materials, 2015.
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!4 approach to get their cleaning specialists to work but wound up with them giving rides to other African American laborers. I have not found any photos of whites driving African
American laborers amid the boycott. Maybe because pictures of whites driving blacks are rare because a few whites in the Jim Crow South were mindful so as not to be related to the developing Civil Rights Movement, which would have made them defenseless in their racist neighborhoods3. Whites and African American, who were giving rides amid the boycott, were forcefully relieved off their taxi licenses to keep them from carrying African American travelers in their private vehicles. When these white drivers carried their employees, they were badgered by the Ku Klux Klan individuals who were mostly police officers and their neighbors. Rosa Parks is a saint, we all concur. Without her grit and responsibility, race relations in America would not have advanced at the velocity it did. Parks, in any case, had a lot of help with changing the Jim Crow South. We need to recollect in our mission for education on the social liberties time that there were houses of worship, associations, and many other individuals involved other than Parks. Many people who started with a racist background wound up with a very surprising perspective of race. What I now realize that I did not know as a kid is that many white individuals likewise felt troubled by that lifestyle, some of whom grew up and went to racist schools at the time, later, turned into anti-racism campaigners.
They were young in those days, and most of them say that they inherited the custom4. These were the same individuals who joined the boycott, broke the old racist standards, and altered their opinions after eras of watchful molding by family and society.

Danielle L. McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance- A New History of the Civil Rights Movement From Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power. (New York: Vintage Books,
2011)
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4

Jeanne Theoharis, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, (Boston: Beacon Press, 2013).

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America ostensibly banned racial discrimination and made a social equality division inside of the Justice Department. Congress passed the act in the wake of the Montgomery boycott as well as the Little Rock affair. On the other hand, the act had a symbolic effect than a lawful one; President Eisenhower assented to the bill reluctantly and guaranteed southern legislators that the law would not have any real changes in their day-to-day life.
This just shows that American history was being made in the Civil Rights Movement era that would resonate and teach future generations.

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Bibliography
Hanson, Joyce Ann, Rosa Parks: A Biography. Westport, Conn: Greenwood, 2010.
Kemp, Kristin, Estadounidenses Asombrosos: Rosa Parks (Amazing Americans: Rosa
Parks). Teacher Created Materials, 2015.
McGuire, Danielle L., At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance- A
New History of the Civil Rights Movement From Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black
Power. New York: Vintage Books, 2011.
Theoharis, Jeanne, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks. Boston: Beacon Press, 2013.

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