Rosa Parks: biography of this civil rights activist in the U.S.

A look at the life of Rosa Parks, a leader of the civil rights movement in the United States.

Rarely has such an insignificant act become an authentic act of protest against injustice, 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 in defiance of an unjust rule.

This led to her arrest and trial, and what could have been just another of the many injustices that blacks had to suffer in the 50's, became a demonstration that showed how African-Americans can destabilize and overthrow a racist system.

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

Brief 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 dedicate herself to teaching little Rosa to read at an early age. When Rosa was only two years old her parents separated, moving with her mother to the home of her maternal grandparents Rose and Sylvester Edwards in Pine Level.

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

While at Pine Level and thanks to her mother's teaching her to read, Rosa Parks was able to attend the local school which, like most schools in the country, was segregated. The treatment between white and black students was stark. While the whites had a bus provided by the municipality and could teach in a new building, the blacks had to walk to class and had little equipment to teach quality classes.

Rosa had to leave school at the age of 16 because her mother and grandmother became ill and she had to take care of them.. Although she was unable to take them up again, she managed to get a job as a seamstress in a shirt factory in the city of Montgomery, which was enough for her to make ends meet. In 1932, at the age of 19, 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 that Rosa was able to obtain her high school diploma a year later.

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

Sitting for Equality

On December 1, 1955, the event that would change Rosa Parks' life and that of thousands of African Americans occurred. That day Rosa Parks would end up arrested for a very simple and insignificant fact: not giving up her seat. She did not give it up not because she was tired, but because she was tired of whites being treated with privilege to the detriment of blacks. Her legal obligation, however unfair, was to have to give up her seat to a white citizen who wished to do so.

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 have the same powers as a police officer while in charge of the bus and must enforce racial compliance. Drivers were required to assign separate seats to black and white passengers, with a line down the middle of the bus: whites in the front, African Americans in the back.

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

The other three passengers got up and obeyed the driver, but Parks refused, even though she knew what it would mean.Parks refused, even though she knew what it meant. She was going to stay seated, not give up her seat because she was black. This courageous 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 Montgomery City Code. She was taken to police headquarters and that same night was released on bail.

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 courthouse a boisterous crowd of 500 people was waiting to support her. In the morning of that day a group of African American leaders met at the Mount Zion Church, in Montgomery, to discuss strategies and decided to promote a boycott of the buses. Thus was born the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) which saw the Rosa Parks case as the perfect opportunity to initiate real change.

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

This $14 fine, which may seem small to us, was enormously unfair and large both for the reason it was levied and for the pocketbook of an African American woman in the 50s. Because of this, the boycott call was widely followed, causing the city's buses to run empty. The 40,000 black commuters who used to use them decided that, from that moment on, they would go to work on foot, and some even had to walk 30 kilometers.

The blacks, so long despised and their rights rejected, discovered how their actions could destabilize a racist white society. When they stopped using the public buses, many of them were stopped, severely damaging the finances of the transportation company. As second-class citizens as the blacks were, the fact that they boycotted the use of transportation meant serious losses for transportation and the city of Montgomery.

Naturally many segregationists orchestrated violent reprisals against the black population.. African-American churches were burned and the homes of Martin Luther King and E. D. Nixon were swept away. African Americans also tried to end the boycott, as many of them were tired of walking long distances to their jobs. Injustices continued to occur, with many blacks arrested on the grounds that an outdated law prohibiting boycotts was being enforced.

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 U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama.. The lawsuit was brought by Rosa Parks' attorney, Fred Gray.

In June 1956, the so-called segregationist "Jim Crow laws" were declared unconstitutional by the District Court. Even so, the city of Montgomery appealed the ruling on November 13, 1956, in a clear attempt to go ahead with its racist system and repress blacks. Likewise, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of Rosa Parks' cause, declaring that transportation segregation was unconstitutional.

The legal ruling along with the financial losses associated with the boycott caused the city of Montgomery to reluctantly lift segregation enforcement on public buses in December 1956. Thanks to the combination of legal action and the determination of the African American community to maintain their boycott, which lasted 381 days, they were able to move closer to racial equality. By not giving up her seat Rosa Parks 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 wide fame, Parks could not save herself from being a victim of reprisals. Both she and her husband were fired from their respective jobs and could not find a new one in Montgomery, so they had to leave the city, settling in Detroit along with Rosa's mother.

In her new city Rosa Parks would work as a secretary and receptionist in the congressional office of U.S. Representative John Conyer.. She also served on the board of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. In 1987 she and her friend Elaine Eason Steele founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development.

Passing

Rosa Louise McCauley Parks died on October 24, 2005 at her apartment in Detroit, Michigan, at the age of 92, of a Heart attack. of a myocardial infarction. The year before, he had been diagnosed with progressive dementia, which he had probably been suffering from since 2002. Her death, like her iconic sitting incident, did not go unnoticed, receiving widespread media attention and a resounding funeral.

She was laid to rest at the Capitol in Washington, where nearly 50,000 people gathered. She became the first woman and the second black person to receive a state funeral of such caliber, granted to only 28 people in the history of the United States. She was subsequently buried next to her husband and mother in Detroit's Woodlawn Cemetery. Shortly thereafter, this would become a chapel to be named the Rosa L. Parks Freedom Chapel.

Acknowledgements

Rosa Parks received many recognitions for her courage and vindictive struggle in favor of equality and the rights of African-Americans. His honors include the Spingarn Medal, the NAACP's highest award, and 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 awarded by the NAACP.the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. executive branch. The following year she would go on to win the Congressional Gold Medal, offered by the U.S. legislative branch.

In 1999 TIME magazine named Parks as one of the 20 most influential people of the 20th century. In 2000 Troy University inaugurated 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 years old, the date was marked by the release of a commemorative U.S. Postal Service stamp called the "Rosa Parks Forever" stamp.. En febrero de ese mismo año el presidente Barack Obama inauguró una estatua en su honor en el Capitolio.

Referencias bibliográficas:

• 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.