On the first of December 1955, a tired Rosa Parks boards a city bus homebound. She was seamstress at a department store in Alabama, so she was exhausted at the end of each and every day. Today was not an exception, she was worked up and as she walks past the first few seats in the bus that were white peoples zones and people like her were not permitted to be seated there. There zones were in the middle, but one would sit only when there is no white man standing. Should there be one, it was mandatory that the black man had to give up the seat to a white man. The bus moves along its designated route until a couple of white people board the bus and the driver orders the black people in Mrs. Parks’ row to move to the back of the bus and give the seats to the white people (Houck, 2005).
Her arrest and subsequent fines triggered a wave of protests. On December 2, D.E Nixon calls a meeting of black people to discuss on how they could fight the segregation that existed on the bus. The black leaders were mobilized and organized boycotts of all the city buses by the blacks on that following Monday. A new popular minister in Montgomery, Martin Luther King is chosen to be the leader of the boycott, which he took with courage and went to the bus stop to see whether their boycott plans could work. In the protest, the protesters chose to walk rather than use the city buses. They walked, used bicycles, pooled cars and went to the extents of using mules to get to work.
This protests influenced many leaders that led the movement. Martin Luther King Junior is a good example. There are many other groups that followed suit. The woman’s Political Council distribute leaflets asking all the black people to keep off the city buses in response to the trial and arrest of Rosa Parks. The result was that dozens of buses stood there idle with no business. The Supreme Court declared that segregation on buses as unconstitutional on November the 13th. The blacks on boycott returned to the buses. Also in September 1966, President Clinton William gave Parks the Medal of Freedom for her heroic acts on the bus. She was also awarded her first State of the Union and later on received a bipartisan enthusiastic response when the president acknowledged her efforts that led to the disappearance of segregation based on races and skin color (Houck, 2005).
On February 1999, Julia Carson introduced H.R. 573 which would eventually award her a golden medal by the senate by a huge majority. These were passed into law on the third of May 1993 by President Clinton. To date, the Medal of Freedom is the greatest reward ever given to a civilian. Rosa Parks passed on at 92 years of age, on the 24th of October 2005 in Mich. A commemorative service was apprehended in her respects and black ribbons were in every bus in her honor. Some people like Condoleezza Rice acknowledged her efforts because were it not for her, she would not have grown to be the secretary of state. Rosa Parks is well celebrated (Theoharis, 2013).
References
Houck, D. W. (2005). From Money To Montgomery: Emmett Till, Rosa Parks, And The Freedom Movement, 1955-2005. Rhetoric & Public Affairs, 8(2), 175-176.
Theoharis, J. (2013). The rebellious life of Mrs. Rosa Parks. Boston: Beacon Press.
