After Mrs. Parks was convicted under city law, her lawyer filed a notice of appeal. While her appeal was tied up in the state court of appeals, a panel of three judges in the U.S. District Court for the region ruled in another case that racial segregation of public buses was unconstitutional. That case, called Browder v. Rosa Parks was a Black civil rights activist whose refusal to give up her bus seat to a white man ignited the American civil rights movement. Because she played a leading role in the Montgomery bus boycott, she is called the ‘mother of the civil rights movement.’ 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 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. 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). The trial took place in recorder’s court, a low-level local court. Parks was fined $10 plus $4 in court costs. Trial de novo. The incident sparked a year-long boycott of the city buses and galvanized the young civil rights movement, but this post will stay focused on Parks’ court case. But the case that “guts her the most,” according to Jeanne Theoharis, author of “The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks,” was the 1952 arrest of a Black teenager named Jeremiah Reeves, who was accused of raping a young white woman with whom he was having a consensual relationship. He was 16 when arrested and 22 when executed. On December 6, Parks was tried on charges of disorderly conduct and violating a local ordinance. She was found guilty and fined. After the trial, Parks appealed her conviction and challenged the legality of racial segregation. Browder v Gayle. Although the Rosa Parks case took place a few months after the plaintiffs of Browder v. On 1 December 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested in Alabama for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man. Discover how her act of defiance sparked the US civil rights movement. Called "the mother of the civil rights movement," Rosa Parks invigorated the struggle for racial equality when she refused to give up her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama. Parks' arrest on December 1, 1955 launched the Montgomery Bus Boycott by 17,000 black citizens. On February 4, 2013—which would have been Parks’ 100th birthday—a commemorative U.S. Postal Service stamp was released called the Rosa Parks Forever stamp, featuring a rendition of the famed Rosa Parks' Bus . In 1955, African Americans were still required by a Montgomery, Alabama, city ordinance to sit in the back half of city buses and to yield their seats to white riders if the Rosa Parks and Elaine Eason Steele co-founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development in February 1987, in honor of Rosa's husband, who died from cancer in 1977. The institute runs the "Pathways to Freedom" bus tours, which introduce young people to important civil rights and Underground Railroad sites throughout the country. Rosa Parks sat tight. The police were called; Rosa was arrested. Rosa Parks being fingerprinted . She wasn't the first person to have been arrested in Montgomery for refusing to give up seats - Claudette Colvin, a fifteen year old girl, had been convicted for refusing to give up her seat to a white person earlier in the year. Claudette's case In 2000, Troy University created the Rosa Parks Museum, located at the site of her arrest in downtown Montgomery, Alabama. In 2001, the city of Grand Rapids, Michigan, consecrated Rosa Parks Circle, a 3.5-acre park designed by Maya Lin, an artist and architect best known for designing the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C. Rosa Parks: Everything was segregated and by law. Transportation, occupation, and just, it was just one of those Southern traditions that was enforced in schools. INTERVIEWER: WAS THERE ANY ONE INCIDENT OR ANYTHING THAT STICKS OUT IN YOUR MIND THAT ILLUSTRATES JUST HOW SEGREGATED IT WAS? Rosa Parks: There are many incidents. Montgomery’s boycott was not entirely spontaneous, and Rosa Parks and other activists had prepared to challenge segregation long in advance. On December 1, 1955, a tired Rosa L. Parks left the department store where she worked as a tailor’s assistant and boarded a crowded city bus for the ride home. But late that night, after talking further with her mother and Raymond, Rosa Parks decided to proceed with the case. She called a young black lawyer and friend from the NAACP, Fred Gray, to ask him to represent her. The 25-year-old Gray, one of only two black lawyers in Montgomery and twelve in the state, agreed. Arrest sparked boycott In the wake of Parks’s arrest, the Women’s Political Council of Montgomery called for a boycott, urging people in the Black community to avoid taking a city bus on the Rosa Parks the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor given to a civilian, and in 1999 the United States Congress honored Rosa Parks with the Congressional Gold Medal. Rosa Parks resided in Detroit until her passing at the age of 92 on October 24, 2005. On October 27, the United States Senate passed a resolution to honor Rosa Parks by
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