A photo of Rosa Parks sitting near the front of a bus more than a year after her arrest when the Montgomery public transportation system was legally integrated.

Who was Rosa Parks?

• Rosa Parks was born in 1913 in Tuskegee, Alabama, where she was raised by her mother and her maternal grandparents (who told her stories of their enslavement).
• She moved to Montgomery at age 11 and cleaned classrooms in order to have the money to attend school.
• In 1932, Rosa married an uneducated barber named Raymond Parks. Rosa supplemented the family income by doing domestic work.
• In 1943, both Rosa and Raymond joined the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP. Rosa was one of the first women to join the organization, and she was elected as the secretary of the Montgomery chapter.
• On December 1, 1955, Rosa was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on the bus during a busy Friday evening commute. At the time of the incident, in response to threats of arrest from the bus driver, she simply said: "You may do that."
• When asked later if she was just too tired to move to the back of the bus, Rosa responded, “The only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”
• A bus boycott ensued. Eleanor Roosevelt commented on the boycott: “…The bus protest carried on by the colored people of Montgomery, Alabama, without violence, has been one of the most remarkable achievements of people fighting for their own rights but doing so without bloodshed and with the most remarkable restraint and discipline, that we have ever witnessed in this country. It is something all of us should be extremely proud of for its achievement by Americans which has rarely before been seen."
• On December 21, 1956, Montgomery’s public transportation system was legally integrated.

What was it like to ride a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, in the 1950s?

The 1950s segregation laws and practices in Montgomery, Alabama, were extremely unfair. Blacks accounted for at least 60 percent of the bus patrons, yet were forced to adhere to oppressive conditions. They were required to pay their fare to the driver along with all other patrons, get off the bus, and walk to the back door to re-board. Sometimes the bus drivers, all of whom were white, would drive off before the passenger could make it to the back entrance.

These boarding practices angered blacks, but the practice of “whites-only” seating was even more maddening. Blacks were not allowed to sit in the front of the bus, even if there were empty seats. If the front “white section” was full, blacks had to give up their seats in the unreserved section of the bus and move farther to the back or stand. The Code of the City of Montgomery (1952) stated, “it shall be unlawful for any passenger to refuse or fail to take a seat among those assigned to the race to which he belongs” (Section 11 of Chapter 6). A black person was not even allowed to sit across the aisle from a white person.

What happened on December 1, 1955?

The bus segregation in Montgomery, Alabama, had been causing friction for years, it just needed a catalyst to force change—Rosa Parks. The following excerpt gives a first person account of the day that Parks launched the monumental struggle toward realization of the American dream of freedom and equality for all citizens.