History is sometimes written by small gestures, for example refusing to give up her seat on a bus, as Rosa Parks did in Alabama in 1955, just because the colour of her skin is not the right colour, starting the fight for black rights. Rosa Louise Mc Cauley was born on 4 February 1913 in Tuskegee, Alabama, to peasant parents. She had to leave high school to care for her sick mother, and at 19 she married Raymond Parks, a barber in her neighbourhood. Her husband was active in NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), the political movement for the emancipation of black people, and convinced her to take the diploma. Rosa had listened to him, but she ended up being a dressmaker in a department store in Montgomery. Every morning she took the bus to work and it was not a pleasure, because the segregation laws called Jim Crow had turned the journey into a daily humiliation. Black people were only allowed to sit in the back seats, while white people were allowed to sit in the front. They were allowed to sit in the middle, but they had to give them up if a light-skinned person claimed them. And if there was no more space on the bus, they were obliged to get off.
On December 1, 1955, at six o'clock in the afternoon, Rosa was on her way home after a day's work, sitting above one of the central seats of the yellow and green Cleveland Avenue bus, along with three other black women. At the height of Cleveland Avenue, a white man got on the bus and demanded the seat. The driver James Blake, who had kicked Parks off another public transport a few years earlier, asked all four black women to get up. The other three did so, but Rosa answered no, defying the social conventions of the time and the biased glances of the whites on board the bus. “If you don't get up”, threatened James F. Blake the driver, “I'm calling the police to arrest you”. Parks stared at him and said, "You can do it too". A few hours later Rosa was at the police station, where they had taken her fingerprints: accusing her of misconduct and violating city regulations. On 5 December, she had ended up before the court, which had sentenced her to a fine of 10 dollars, plus 4 dollars in court costs. The news made the African-American communities of the entire nation quickly and in a few days the indignation spread, the civil rights movement was waiting for nothing else. On 4 December the blacks, starting from Cleveland, had proclaimed the boycott of public transport. At the head of the revolt was a young reverend from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, named Martin Luther King. After 381 days on foot, the blacks took revenge. On November 13, 1956, the first major victory came, the Supreme Court banned segregation on buses. On December 20th the order arrived in Montgomery and the day after the boycott ended. From that day on, other important victories followed with the approval of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The civil rights movement became a consolidated reality, a wave of justice and freedom that invaded all of America in the name of Mrs Rosa.
