Rosa Parks (1913—2005) helped initiate the civil rights movement in the United States when she refused to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery, Alabama bus in 1955. Her actions Despite what the eulogies might suggest, Parks did not ride off into the sunset on the front of that bus. But on December 1, 1955, African American seamstress Rosa Parks was commuting home on Montgomery’s Cleveland Avenue bus from her job at a local department store. She was seated in the front On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a 42-year-old African-American seamstress, refused to give up her seat to a white man while riding on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama. For doing this, Parks was arrested and fined for breaking the laws of segregation. Today marks the anniversary of Rosa Parks’ decision to sit down for her rights on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus, putting the effort to end segregation on a fast track. Parks was arrested on December 1, 1955, after she refused to give up her seat on a crowded bus to a white passenger. On a cold December evening in 1955, Rosa Parks quietly incited a revolution — by just sitting down. She was tired after spending the day at work as a department store seamstress. She stepped onto the bus for the ride home and sat in the fifth row — the first row of the "Colored Section." In 1955, Parks rejected a bus driver's order to leave a row of four seats in the "colored" section once the white section had filled up and move to the back of the bus. Her defiance sparked a successful boycott of buses in Montgomery a few days later. On December 1, 1955, Parks was riding a crowded Montgomery city bus when the driver, upon noticing that there were white passengers standing in the aisle, asked Parks and other Black passengers to surrender their seats and stand. Three of the passengers left their seats, but Parks refused. In the middle of the crowded bus, Parks was arrested for her refusal to relinquish her seat on Dec. 1, 1955 — 61 years ago. Parks, 42, paid a fine and was briefly locked up. Rosa Parks is fingerprinted by police. On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of a city bus. Little did the 42-year-old know that her act would help end segregation laws in the South. She was on her way home 5. Rosa Parks was the first black woman to exercise civil disobedience on a Montgomery bus. Nearly nine months before Rosa Parks’s famous arrest, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin was arrested on a Montgomery bus for refusing to yield her seat to a white passenger. She refused to move, began yelling about her constitutional rights, and had to be In March 1955, nine months before Rosa Parks defied segregation laws by refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin did exactly Sparking a Social Transformation. It’s one of the most famous moments in modern American civil rights history: On the chilly evening of December 1, 1955, at a bus stop on a busy street in the capital of Alabama, a 42-year-old seamstress boarded a segregated city bus to return home after a long day of work, taking a seat near the middle, just behind the front “white” section. Rosa Parks (center, in dark coat and hat) rides a bus at the end of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Montgomery, Alabama, Dec. 26, 1956. Don Cravens/The LIFE Images Collection via Getty Images/Getty Images. Most of us know Rosa Parks as the African American woman who quietly, but firmly, refused to give up her bus seat to a white person Dec. 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama. That small act of Nine months before Rosa Parks, there was Claudette Colvin, a 15-year old black girl who was the first person to be arrested for refusing to sit in the back of the bus. The year was 1955. She was one of five women included in a federal court case, Browder v. Rosa Parks wasn't the first black person to refuse to move to the back of the bus—nine months before, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin had done the same thing, and there were many others—but she Y ou probably think you know the story of Rosa Parks, the seamstress who refused to move to the back of the bus in Montgomery, Ala., 60 years ago—on Dec. 1, 1955—and thus galvanized the bus The actual bus on which Rosa Parks sat was made available for the public to board and sit in the seat that Rosa Parks refused to give up. [ 153 ] On February 4, 2,000 birthday wishes gathered from people throughout the United States were transformed into 200 graphics messages at a celebration held on her 100th Birthday at the Davis Theater for The story of Rosa Parks as a radical activist and believer in self-defense and Black Power; of the Women’s Political Council that started the boycott and of the many women who came before Mrs. Parks; and of the development of King’s profound vision of nonviolent resistance through the aid of his brilliant new mentor, Bayard Rustin who as a gay man was forced to stay in the shadows. Montgomery bus driver James Blake ordered Parks and three other African Americans seated nearby to move ("Move y'all, I want those two seats,") to the back of the bus. Three riders complied; Parks did not. The following excerpt of what happened next is from Douglas Brinkley's 2000 Rosa Park's biography.
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