Rosa Parks

June 15, 1999: Rosa Parks when she was presented with a Congressional Gold Medal by President Bill Clinton.

Rosa Parks (born February 4, 1913 in Tuskegee, Alabama and died October 24, 2005 in Detroit, Michigan) is an African American woman who became an iconic figure in the fight against segregation and racial discrimination in the United States, which earned her the nickname "mother of the civil rights movement" from the US Congress. Rosa Parks later fought against racial segregation with Martin Luther King.

Rosa Parks at Police Station (http://www.smithsoniansource.org/display/primarysource/viewdetails.aspx?PrimarySourceId=1162)

She became famous on December 1, 1955, in Montgomery (Alabama) by refusing to give way to a white passenger in the bus led by James F. Blake. Arrested by the police, she was fined $ 15 on 5 December 1955. She appealed against that judgment. A young unknown black pastor of 26 years, Martin Luther King, with the help of Ralph Abernathy, then launched a campaign of protest and boycott against the bus company that will last 380 days. On November 13, 1956, the Supreme Court of the United States breached the segregationist laws in the buses, declaring them unconstitutional.

In 1944, baseball player Jackie Robinson faced a similar case when, faced with an Army officer in Fort Hood, Texas, he refused to go to the back of the bus. Robinson is brought before a court martial, which acquits him.The NAACP handles other cases, such as that of Irene Morgan ten years earlier, which is victorious before the Supreme Court on commercial aspects. However, this victory only sidelined segregation laws to the extent that they applied to inter-state trade, such as bus lines between different states.

Black militants began preparing for the defense of a 15-year-old girl arrested, Claudette Colvin, while she was a high school student at Booker T. Washington High School in Montgomery. On March 2, 1955, Colvin was handcuffed, arrested and expelled manu militari from a public bus after she refused to yield her seat to a white man. She claims that her constitutional rights have been violated. Colvin was an active member of the NAACP youth group, of which Rosa Parks was an advisor. Colvin remembers: "Mrs. Parks said, 'Do what is right.'" Rosa Parks raises funds for Colvin's defense, but when ED Nixon learns she is pregnant, he considers that it is not a suitable symbol for their cause. In fact, shortly after her arrest, she becomes pregnant with an older married man; This moral transgression scandalizes profoundly the pious black community. His strategists believe that the white segregationist press would argue Colvin's pregnancy to discredit any boycott.The NAACP also studied but rejected other cases prior to Rosa Parks, which were considered insufficient to cope with the opponents' pressures in a legal confrontation with segregationist laws. Colvin was also known for for her verbal slippage. Most of the charges against her are dropped.The NAACP strategists continue to seek a complainant beyond reproach. Similarly, another woman, Mary Louise Smith, was not defended, on the rumor that her father was an alcoholic. On the contrary, Rosa Parks is one of the most distinguished women in the city, whose education has no remark, and therefore a better standard for the black cause.

The boycott in Montgomery Main article: Boycott of Montgomery buses. Rosa Parks became famous when, on December 1, 1955, in the town of Montgomery, she refused to obey the bus driver James Blake, who asked him to leave his place to a White man and go to sit at the back of the bus. In the Montgomery buses, the first four rows are reserved for whites. Blacks, who account for three-quarters of users, have to sit in the back. They may nevertheless use the central zone until whites need it; They must either give way and go to the bottom or leave the bus, if these places are occupied. Blacks must buy their tickets at the front but are required to leave before returning back through the back door of the bus to access the places they are allocated. Mrs. Parks was not the first person to violate this regulation, others had paid hard, sometimes their lives. For years, the black community complains about the situation and Mrs. Parks is no exception: "My resistance to these ill treatments on the bus did not start with this arrest . I did a lot of walking in Montgomery."

Parks made it a public experience on a rainy day in November 1943, when bus driver James Blake, as usual, asked her to pay for his run in the front, back down and back up through the back door. Seeing that the world hinders access from the rear, she decides to go straight to the back. Blake furious, hand on his revolver, grabs it to bring it forward. She then intentionally drops her purse and sits for a moment on a seat reserved for white passengers to retrieve it. Blake barely leaves him time to get off the bus, which he restarts. Rosa Parks walks more than eight kilometers in the rain. Ironically, it will be the same driver on December 1, 1955 when she sought to avoid it since this event. On that day in 1955, she had apparently not premeditated her gesture, but once she had decided, she fully assumed it. She states in her autobiography (which she published with James Haskins in 1992): "People say I refused to give up my seat because I was tired, but that's not true.I was not tired physically, or no more than usual at the end of a day's work. I was not old, while some give me the image of an old woman. I was 42 years old. No, the only fatigue I had was that of yielding. "

Parks on a Montgomery bus on December 21, 1956, the day Montgomery's public transportation system was legally integrated. Behind Parks is Nicholas C. Chriss, a UPI reporter covering the event. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa_Parks)

She is arrested, tried and charged with public disorder and violation of local laws. She joined lawyer Edgar Nixon, a member of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP. Although furious at the treatment of Mrs. Parks, he immediately saw the symbolic interest of the struggle.He calls a white lawyer, Clifford Durr, who agrees to challenge the law on segregation that Rosa Parks is the victim. The following night, fifty leaders of the African-American community, led by a little-known pastor at the time, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, met at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church to discuss actions to be taken Following the arrest of Rosa Parks.They founded the Montgomery Improvement Association, of which they elected King as president. He popularized theories of non-violence and civil disobedience.The movement has three immediate demands: That whites and blacks can sit where they want on the bus; That drivers are more courteous to all people; That black drivers are hired.