DARE TO DREAM BIG!: From Ordinary Working Woman to Civil Rights Activist

Imagine This: It’s December l, 1955, and you’re a 42-year-old black woman taking the bus home after work. It’s been a long day and you’re very tired. You sit in the first seat for blacks which is right behind the white section. After a few stops, a white man gets on the bus and looks for an empty seat, but there aren’t any. Then the bus driver comes over to you and asks you to give up your seat to the white man. In the past, you’ve done this many times, but what are you going to do tonight? Are you going to give up your seat or are you going to refuse to move?

 You’re born in Tuskegee, Alabama, in 1913, the first of two children. Your father is a carpenter and your mother had once been a teacher.

 Growing up in Montgomery, Alabama, you hate the unfair rules that black people have to live by. Black children can’t attend the same schools as white children. Black families can’t eat in white restaurants or use white swimming pools or see movies at white theaters. And they can only use restrooms and drinking fountains with signs that say “Colored Only.”

 You’re an excellent student and at age eleven you go to a private school for black girls run by a white woman from the North named Alice White who believes that black girls deserve a good education. Unfortunately, it closes down before you can finish high school.

 A few weeks before your twentieth birthday, you marry Raymond, a barber, who shares many of your values. After your marriage, you move to Montgomery where you earn your high school diploma in 1933. 

 You and Raymond join the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP (the National Association for Advancement of Colored People), an organization that works to help black people gain their civil rights. You’re elected its secretary and assist the chapter’s president, Edgar Daniel Nixon.

You refuse to ride in the elevators in public buildings that are marked “Colored” and use the stairs instead. And, on hot days even though your throat is dry, you still walk right past the water fountains marked “Colored.”

 You also often walk the mile to and from work rather than ride the bus because the buses are worst of all. Black people have to get on at the front door and pay their fare, then get off the bus and walk to the back door and board the bus again. Sometimes the driver drives away before the black passengers reach the back door even after they’ve paid their fares.    

 If you do manage to get on the bus, you’re allowed to sit only in the seats at the back of the bus because the seats in the front half are reserved for whites. And if a white person gets on the bus and there’s no empty seat, the black person sitting closest to the white section is expected to give up his seat to the white person.

 On Thursday evening, December 1, 1955, you leave work and start home after a long and tiring day as a seamstress. Your shoulders ache from being hunched over your sewing machine, and you decide to take the bus.

 You sit in the first seat for blacks right behind the white section. After a few stops, all the seats are filled when a white man gets on. The bus driver tells you and the other three black people in your row to give up your seats to the white man because blacks and whites can’t sit together in the same row. The other three blacks get up, but you decide it’s time to stand up for yourself, and you refuse to move.

 And thus begins the chain of events that leads to the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement. Your arrest, the Montgomery Bus Boycott which lasts for 381 days, your trial, and eventually the Supreme Court Ruling on December 20, 1956, that bus segregation is both unconstitutional and illegal.

 Some people call you “the Mother of the Civil Rights Movement” because people all across the nation read about Montgomery and begin to follow your example. You have changed the lives of African Americans in Montgomery and all across America with one courageous act!

 The Montgomery Bus Boycott helps launch the Civil Rights Movement which leads to President Lyndon B. Johnson signing the Civil Rights Act in 1964. When you die in 2005, at the age of ninety-two, your casket is placed in the rotunda of the United States Capitol for two days, so the nation can pay its respects to the woman whose courage had changed the lives of so many. You are proof that the act of one person can indeed change the world!

                                     “The only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”

                                                  Rosa Parks (1913-2005)

 Excerpted from They Stood Alone!: 25 Men and Women Who Made a Difference by Sandra McLeod Humphrey

 For More about

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8A9gvb5Fh0

Giving Back: Rosa Parks worked for equal rights for African Americans through her work with many organizations such as the NAACP, the Montgomery Voters League, and CORE (Congress of Racial Equality).

 Did You Know Rosa Parks was born the same year that Harriet Tubman died?

 Something to Think about: Why do you think Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus on December 1, 1955, when she’d given up her seat many times before to a white person?

Willoughby and I hope you enjoyed this week’s true story and will be back next week for another story to inspire you to DARE TO DREAM BIG!