Tuesday, October 25, 2005

Associated Press Rosa Parks sits up fron on a Montgomery, Ala. bus in December 1956. It was her refusal to give up her seat a year earlier that led the U.S. Supreme Court to declare the city's segregated seating law unconstitutional.

Defiant act changed a nation's history

Parks' refusal to give up bus seat galvanized the quest for equality

By Shawn D. Lewis / The Detroit News

Associated Press A sheriff's deputy in Montgomery, Ala., fingerprints Rosa Parks in 1955. Her arrest for refusing to give up her bus seat mobilized equality efforts in the South. Comment on this story Send this story to a friend Get Home Delivery

Soon after 5 p.m. on Dec. 1, 1955, Rosa Parks finished another day of altering clothes for 80 cents an hour at the Montgomery Fair department store.

She walked out that Thursday evening onto Court Street and saw the Cleveland Avenue bus coming.

Since it was crammed, she decided to wait for the next bus and ducked into Lee's Cut Rate drugstore to look for a heating pad that would ease the muscle spasms in her shoulders.

The next bus was operated by veteran driver James F. Blake, who 12 years earlier had thrown Parks off a bus for refusing to follow the rules for black riders: pay the fare in the front, get off and get back on through the rear door. Blacks were not allowed to pay at the front and walk through the bus.

The first 10 seats on Montgomery buses were reserved for whites, but that didn't mean blacks were entitled to the others. After whites filled the front 10 seats, black riders in the next row back had to give up their seats and move if more whites boarded. Because blacks were not allowed to sit across the aisle from whites, an 11th white rider could cause four blacks to lose their seats.

Parks took the last vacant seat in the section open to blacks, in the first row behind the white section, and began the 1 1/2 -mile ride home. There were no plans for a confrontation, she wrote in her autobiography, "Rosa Parks: My Story."

"On the third stop, up there by the Empire Theatre, is when a few more people got on," she wrote. "They took up what were called the white reserved seats, and one (white) man was standing.

"And when the driver looked around and saw him standing, he did not move from where he was, but asked us to let him have those front seats -- he called them front seats.

"When he first spoke, didn't any of us stand up. And when he spoke the second time, he said, 'You all better make it light on yourselves and let me have those seats.'"

Parks said the black man next to her and the two black women across the aisle from her got up and moved to the rear of the bus.

Parks slid into the seat next to the window.

"I do not remember being frightened," she recalled in her book. "But I sure did not believe I would 'make it light' on myself by standing up."

When the other three people stood up and Parks refused, the bus driver "asked me 'was I going to stand.' I told him no. And then he said, 'Well, if you don't stand up, I will call a policeman and have you arrested.' So I told him to go ahead and call him.

"He got out of the bus and stayed a few minutes ... Finally two policemen got on ... "

One policeman "asked me why I didn't stand up, and I asked him, 'Why do you all push us around?' And he said to me, and I quote him exactly, 'I don't know, but the law is the law and you're under arrest.'"

Parks was booked, fingerprinted and jailed. E.D. Nixon, then 56, the patriarch of civil rights activism in Montgomery, was among those who bailed her out.

"The next Monday, Dec. 5, was the day of the trial when I was found guilty," Parks said. "It didn't last but a few minutes and nobody was surprised at the verdict."

She was fined $10 plus $4 in court costs for violating segregation laws.

"But that night at my church, the Holt Street Baptist Church, we had a meeting, and thousands of people came," Parks said.

"Most of them couldn't even get into the church. But there were so many people in the streets and off the buses that I think that was the first time I thought something special might be happening."

She met with her attorney, Nixon and a handful of other supporters to discuss possible action to protest the bus line's policies. They agreed on a boycott.

In her book, Parks wrote about the church meeting: "Mr. Nixon spoke first. He was probably worried that people wouldn't really support a long boycott. He said, 'You who are afraid, you better get your hat and coat and go home. This is going to be a long, drawn out affair. I want to tell you something: For years and years I've been talking about how I didn't want the children who came along behind me to have to suffer the indignities that I've suffered all these years. Well, I've changed my mind -- I want to enjoy some of that freedom myself."

Parks and Nixon stressed that her arrest had not been planned. Once it happened though, Nixon knew he had the perfect plaintiff for a court case.

The Detroit News Rosa Parks' defiant move in 1955, many agree, was the turning point for fair and equal treatment for African-Americans.