Rosa Parks - a woman who changed America with civil disobedience

Rosa Parks (February 4, 1913 - Detroit, October 24, 2005) was an African-American human rights activist and tailor who was declared the "mother of the modern human rights movement" by the US Congress.

Rosa Parks was born Rosa Louise McCauley Parks in Taskigi, to father James, a carpenter, and mother, Leona Makeli, a teacher. After her parents divorced, Rosa and her mother moved to Pine Level, not far from Montgomery. They lived on the estate together with their grandparents, as well as Rosa's younger brother Sylvester. Rosa Parks became a member of the African Medotist Episcopal Church, to which she will belong for the rest of her life. Until the age of eleven, her mother taught her at home, after which she enrolled in the Industrial School for Girls in Montgomery. She subsequently attended Alabama State College, but was forced to leave it to care for her grandmother and later her ailing mother.

In 1932, Rosa married Raymond Parks, a barber from Montgomery. Raymond was a member of a group that raised money to support a group of blacks who were unjustly accused of raping two white women. After marriage, Rosa did a variety of jobs, from working as a housekeeper to helping out at the hospital. At her husband's urging, in 1933 she completed her high school education. At the time, just under 7% of African Americans had a high school diploma. Despite Jim Roof's so-called law, which made it very difficult for blacks to participate politically, Rosa managed to register to vote on her third attempt.

In December 1943, Parks became an active member of the Human Rights Movement, joining the NAAKP branch in Montgomery. She volunteered as a secretary to President Edgar Nixon. About her position, she later said: "I was the only woman there, and they needed a secretary and I was too shy to say no."

The struggle for desegregation in the United States has been very long and arduous, and has originated from individuals who, through their individual cases, climbed the legislative ladder to the Constitutional Court and changed segregation laws one by one, so to speak, manually. Even the victories were hard to come by. Despite the successful legal abolition of racial segregation in schools in 1954 (Brown v. Education Board), it remained de facto in force in a large number of southern states for a very long time. The racist population in the states of the former Confederation vigorously and dramatically opposed these changes, openly expressing their dissatisfaction in the form of direct, sometimes violent, resistance.

However, unlike schools, where changes took place almost directly through the judiciary and legal proceedings, in the field of public transport this path was a little more dramatic.

Segregation in public transportation was designed so that the seats would be divided into two bus zones - in the first half of the bus, the seats were reserved for light-skinned citizens, while the other half of the bus was for African Americans. If the bus were full, every African-American passenger would have to give his seat to a white man who gets on the bus, and spend the rest of the ride standing. Drivers had the discretion to control the distribution of seats and regulate the accommodation of passengers, and they were even legally armed in case the tension between the passengers escalated.

The boycott of public transport began with the famous case of Rosa Parks, who on December 1, 1955, refused to give up her seat on a white bus, for which she was arrested. Her act of civil disobedience started a revolt among the citizens of Montgomery, who in just two days managed to organize a massive but secret boycott of public transport at the level of the entire city. Some walked, hitchhiked on the day of the boycott, and some used horse-drawn carriages or rode mules. Martin Luther King, a hitherto unknown young priest, was elected leader of the boycott.

Besides King, who is considered the ideological leader and key figure of the Civil Rights Movement, Rosa Parks is probably the most famous figure in that period of American history, whose process began the entire process of political and social change, until the final abolition of laws based on racial segregation. and racial discrimination in the United States.

Although Rosa later often joked that she was just tired that day, and that she hated to get up from her seat, far from just accidentally finding herself in the right place at the right time. Rosa was then forty-two years old, and had many years of experience in activism and the fight for civil rights. She participated in numerous campaigns, worked as a secretary of the local branch of the Movement for more than a decade, and as a counselor in their youth committee, she was educated on methods of nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience.

The trial called Browder v. Gale began in February 1956, two months after the act of Rosa Parks. The lawsuit was based on a violation of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, which guaranteed equal protection before the law for all citizens, through racial segregation in public transportation in Montgomery. On June 19, 1956, the court ruled that racial segregation in public transportation in Montgomery was unconstitutional, and that the law in the Brown v. Education Board case, which had previously abolished racial segregation in schools, could be applied to public transportation. This verdict was confirmed by the Constitutional Court in December. The boycott of public transport, which lasted a total of 381 days, ended that month.

Rosa Parks lived in Detroit until her death. She died in her apartment on October 24, 2005, at the age of 92. In 2004, she was diagnosed with dementia.

Her body was laid on the altar in the church in Montgomery. The commemoration was held the next morning, and in the evening, the coffin was transferred to the city of Washington by a bus similar to the one in which Rosa once refused to give her place to a white man. It is estimated that the coffin on the stage in Washington was seen by 50,000 people, and the event was shown on television on October 31, after which another commemoration was held.

Although scheduled to last a maximum of three hours, due to a delay of one hour, a large number of speakers and the length of the speech, the funeral was extended to seven hours, until late at night, so many television stations outside Detroit did not broadcast it completely.

During the passage of the funeral procession on the way to the cemetery, the gathered crowd applauded and released white balloons into the air.