‘Bored with giving in’: Civil rights activist Rosa Parks born on at the present time in 1913

Rosa Parks, who fought for civil rights long before the Montgomery, Ala. Bus boycott in 1955, was born on February 4, 1913.

Parks joined the local NAACP chapter in December 1943 and became secretary to which her husband Raymond was already a member. Before that, she and her husband helped defend the Scottsboro Boys – “nine black teenagers falsely accused of raping two white women on a train near Scottsboro, Alabama, in 1931,” according to history.com .

However, it is best known for the bus incident on December 1, 1955 in Montgomery.

Park, 43, got on the bus after work.

According to a city ordinance, she was supposed to be in the back of the bus because she was black. The back of the bus was full. She sat down next to a black man in third place from the front. Two other black men sat across the hall.

“Two stops later, white passengers had filled the front seats and had to get up. The driver told Ms. Parks and the three men to leave their seats.

All three men obeyed. Mrs. Parks refused to move, which she called a spontaneous impulse. The driver called the police and they briefly stayed in jail until the $ 100 bond was issued, ”wrote Ray Jenkins in The Patriot on March 5, 1956.

“I had given up my seat once before, but that day I was particularly tired. Tired of working as a seamstress and tired of the pain in my heart, “said Parks. She later said, “People always say that I didn’t give up my place because I was tired, but that’s not true. I wasn’t physically tired … No, the only one who was tired was tired of giving in. “

Rosa Parks Day is celebrated on either her birthday, February 4th, or December 1st, the day she refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white passenger.

Parks’ actions that day resulted in a city-wide boycott of buses, which ended segregation on public buses.

Parks was found guilty and fined $ 10 plus legal costs.

A few days after the incident, the black community formed the Montgomery Improvement Association. The club elected a president – the Baptist minister, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Blacks stopped using the buses. Churches organized car pools. According to newspaper reports, the boycott cost the bus route $ 3,200 a day. The boycott lasted more than a year and ended on December 20, 1956 when the buses were separated.

It got worse long before it ever got better.

According to biography.com, Rosa and her husband lost their jobs right after the bus boycott began.

Two years later, in 1957, Parks and her family moved to Detroit, where their family lived, but they could not find work there either. Rosa took a job in Virginia, but her employer, who had offered her accommodation for her mother and husband, did not follow suit and returned to Detroit.

Her husband Raymond, who was a hairdresser, needed more training to get a job. Rosa still couldn’t find a full-time job and then had to undergo surgery for an ulcer and again for a tumor in her throat.

In July 1960, the family drowned in debt and had no income. In 1961 Raymond found work as a hairdresser and she found work in a sewing shop.

Parks continued to be involved in the civil rights movement. She volunteered for John Conyers’ congressional campaign in 1964. After he won, she worked in his office from 1965 to 1988 when she retired.

She died on October 24, 2005 in Detroit, Michigan, at the age of 92.

The front seats of the buses in Montgomery and Detroit were wrapped in black ribbons in her honor until her funeral. After death, she flew to Montgomery, where she lay in peace before a memorial service. It was then transported to Washington DC to be honored in the rotunda of the US Capitol.

After her body returned to Detroit, she rested at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History. Her funeral on November 2, 2005 lasted seven hours.

Rosa Parks was born on February 4, 1913. She died in 2005.BN

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• The 15th anniversary of Rosa Parks being the first woman to be honored in the Capitol.