Congress recognized Parks as the “Mother of the Civil Rights Movement. Rosa Parks 1913-2005 By Arlisha Norwood, NWHM Fellow 2017 On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks boarded a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Supreme Court banned all segregation on public transportation. Rosa Parks sits in the front of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, after the Supreme Court ruled segregation on public transportation illegal in November 1956. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.” The African-American community in Montgomery, led by local ministers Ralph Abernathy and Martin Luther King, Jr., responded to Parks’ arrest by organizing a remarkable year-long bus boycott. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. Many reports say Parks was tired after a long day of work, a characterization Parks herself denied: “People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. In 1955, the law in Alabama required African Americans to give up their seats to whites if the bus was full. Nearly 50 years ago, Rosa Parks became a symbol of the mass movement against racism that eventually forced the dismantling of the system of official segregation in the American South. The other passenger was white and Parks was black. On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, after a bus driver ordered her to give up her bus seat to another passenger, and she refused.
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