December 1, 1955: Rosa Parks Is Arrested. On Thursday, December 1, 1955, the 42-year-old Rosa Parks was commuting home from a long day of work at the Montgomery Fair department store by bus. Black 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. 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 Rosa Parks, an African American, was arrested that day for violating a city law requiring racial segregation of public buses. On the city buses of Montgomery, Alabama, the front 10 seats were permanently reserved for white passengers. The diagram shows that Mrs. Parks was seated in the first row behind those 10 seats. Rosa Parks Day is a holiday in honor of the civil rights leader Rosa Parks, celebrated in the U.S. states of Missouri and Massachusetts on her birthday, February 4, in Michigan and California on the first Monday after her birthday, and in Ohio, Texas, Alabama, Tennessee, Oregon and several cities and counties on the day she was arrested, December 1. April 14, 2005: Parks and the hip-hop group Outkast reach an out-of-court settlement regarding their 1998 song "Rosa Parks." October 24, 2005: Parks dies at the age of 92 In Montgomery, Alabama on December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks is jailed for refusing to give up her seat on a public bus to a white man, a violation of the city’s racial segregation laws. The Women’s Political Council (WPC), a group of Black women working for civil rights, began circulating flyers calling for a boycott of the bus system on December 5, the day Parks would be tried Parks later said of the incident: Inarguably the biggest event of the day, however, was what Parks’ trial had triggered. The city’s buses were, by and large, empty. The Rosa Parks Parks continued to face harassment following the boycott’s successful conclusion and decided to move to Detroit to seek better employment opportunities. Shortly before her departure, the MIA declared 5 August 1957 “Rosa Parks Day.” A celebration was held at Mt. Zion AME Zion Church, and $800 was presented to Parks. Rosa Parks Day is celebrated in the U.S. on December 1 to honor Rosa Parks, the brave civil rights activist. Her contributions have been most impactful to the movement, but her most famous incident is her refusal to give up her seat on a bus she was commuting on. Rosa Parks was born Rosa Louise McCauley in Tuskegee, Alabama, on February 4, 1913, to Leona (née Edwards), a teacher, and James McCauley, a carpenter.In addition to African ancestry, one of Parks's great-grandfathers was Scots-Irish, and one of her great-grandmothers was a part–Native American slave. Today, a major thoroughfare and an elementary school in North Portland bear Rosa Parks’ name, and she is widely celebrated as the “Mother of the Civil Rights Movement.” TriMet renamed our Portland Avenue MAX Yellow Line Station for Rosa Parks in 2009, and in 2020, our Board of Directors passed a resolution declaring Feb. 4 as Rosa Parks Day. When Rosa passed away on October 24, 2005, at the age of 92, people around the world mourned her loss. Her body lay in honor in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda, an honor reserved for only a few great Americans. Why Rosa Parks Matters. Rosa Parks’ story is a reminder that courage doesn’t always come with loud speeches or grand gestures. Four days before the incident, Parks attended a meeting where she learned of the acquittal of Till's murderers. In her autobiography, Rosa Parks: My Story (1992), Parks declares her defiance was an intentional act: "I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people Rosa Parks (born February 4, 1913, Tuskegee, Alabama, U.S.—died October 24, 2005, Detroit, Michigan) was an American civil rights activist whose refusal to relinquish her seat on a public bus precipitated the 1955–56 Montgomery bus boycott in Alabama, which became the spark that ignited the civil rights movement in the United States. At the front of a bus, previously reserved for white riders, is Rosa Parks, face turned to the window to her left, seemingly lost in thought as she rides through Montgomery, Ala. In the seat behind her is a young white man looking to his right, his face hard, almost expressionless. Rosa Parks: Well, the first meeting was not at the Baptist Church. The first meeting we had was at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Dr. Martin Luther King's church where he was pastoring. That was — on Friday evening. INTERVIEWER: I'M TALKING ABOUT THE BIG MEETING AT THE — Rosa Parks: Oh, the big meeting at the Holt Street Baptist Church. To coincide with her trial on December 5, 1955, the Women’s Political Council initiated a one-day citywide bus boycott. That evening, E. D. Nixon and other black leaders called a mass meeting at Holt Street Baptist Church and voted to extend the bus boycott under the direction of the newly formed Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA). Shortly after Parks’s arrest, Jo Ann Robinson, a leader of the WPC, and E.D. Nixon, president of the local NAACP, printed and distributed leaflets describing Parks’s arrest and called for a one-day boycott of the city buses on December 5. They believed that the boycott could be effective because the Montgomery bus system was heavily
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