From the back of the bus to the White House

Of course, as you know, we’re talking about Rosa Parks and President Obama. Between 1955 and 2008, African Americans in the United States  moved from the back of a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama to an address on Pennsylvania Ave in Washington, D.C.

Rosa Parks was 42-years-old and worked at a department store in Montgomery. When she got off work on December 1, 1955 she caught a bus for her ride home. She paid the fare and took a seat one row behind the section reserved for white passengers. When the white section filled up, there were three whites left standing. The bus driver told Ms. Parks to move to the back. This was in 1955 when segregation was rampant in America. Ms. Parks refused to move but instead scooted over to the window leaving space in the row for others.

In her autobiography, Parks wrote, “People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true.  I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day.  No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in. I knew someone had to take the first step and I made up my mind not to move. Our mistreatment was just not right, and I was tired of it.”

Rosa Parks

The bus driver called the police, who came and arrested Ms. Parks. She was charged with violating the part of the Montgomery city code that dealt with segregation. She spent one day in jail before making bail and was fined $14.00. In an interview with National Public Radio in 1992 she explained:

“I did not want to be mistreated, I did not want to be deprived of a seat that I had paid for.  It was just time…there was opportunity for me to take a stand to express the way I felt about being treated in that manner.  I had not planned to get arrested.  I had plenty to do without having to end up in jail.  But when I had to face that decision, I didn’t hesitate to do so because I felt that we had endured that too long.  The more we gave in, the more we complied with that kind of treatment, the more oppressive it became.”

Her action on that day led to the Montgomery bus boycott that lasted a year and included the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. It resulted in the integration of Montgomery’s buses and inspired the civil rights movement that resulted in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It also opened the door for Barack Obama to become the first African-American to be elected President of the United States in 2008.

In February, 2013, Rosa Parks became the first African-American woman to be honored with a full-length statue in the Capitol’s Statuary Hall in Washington, D.C. At the ceremony, President Obama commented that her “singular act of disobedience launched a movement” that lasts to this day. “Rosa Parks tells us there’s always something we can do. She tells us that we all have responsibilities, to ourselves and to one another.” Ms. Parks passed away in 2005 at age 92.