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.

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"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