Wednesday, November 29, 2023

Rosa Parks: The 'no' that sparked movement

Myles Burke, BBC.com, 11/29/23; Crystal Q., CC Liu (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly
Heroic Rosa Parks in 1955, after planning to say "no" to getting up (Getty Images)
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Rosa Parks: The 'no' that sparked the civil rights movement
I have seen the Promised Land.
On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white passenger.

In these exclusive BBC clips, discover how her courageous act of defiance set in motion a chain of events that ended segregation in the US, but at a personal cost to Parks herself.

On a winter's evening in 1955, a 42-year-old African-American woman named Rosa Parks, tired after a long day of work as a seamstress, boarded a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, to get home. She paid her fare and took an empty seat in the area of the bus marked "colored."


Ladies man Rev. MLK, Jr.
Fifty-five years earlier, racist Montgomery had passed a law to segregate bus passengers by race. The front of the bus was reserved for white travelers, the seats at the back for Blacks.

But it had also become a custom that bus drivers would instruct a Black passenger to give up a seat if there were no "white-only" seats.

As the bus filled up, bus driver James Blake demanded that she and three other black passengers give up their seats. Rosa Parks alone refused.

Females were attracted to MLK's charisma.
"I did this because I felt I was being violated as a human being. I had had a hard day at work on the job, [I was] physically tired as well as mentally vexed. I was sick of this type of thing we had to endure as a people because of our race," she later said in a BBC interview. More + VIDEO

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