With one simple act, a lady by the name of Rosa Parks did just that; she set in motion one of the widest spread and far reaching movements this country has ever seen. She has been called many names; however the most prolific name is “the mother of the civil rights movement”. Rosa Parks made an enormous impact on the society in which she lived.
Starting life as Rosa Louise McCauley on February 4, 1913 in Tuskegee, Alabama was not a fairy-tale by any stretch of the imagination. After her parents separation she and her family moved to her grandparents’ farm in Pine Level, Alabama. Here she experienced both her first taste of racism and her first introduction to the fight for racial equality. Rosa’s grandparents Rosa and Sylvester Edwards were both former slaves and strong activists for the equal treatment of all races. With the knowledge that both her grandparents were once another man’s property, and that they still fought for equal rights; later in life she would continue their fight all the way to the United States Supreme Court.
While living with her grandparents in Pine Level, Alabama Rosa attended an African-American school, which was a one-room school house. This school experienced shortages in desks and school supplies on a regular basis. This was Rosa’s first taste of the true meaning of segregation, while the African-American students had to walk to their modest school; the white students had bus transportation, and a brand new school building, and did not suffer any real shortages. This was what Alabama called “separate, but equal”. The remainder of her education was spent in a segregated school in Montgomery, Alabama. At the age of 16, Rosa dropped out of school to care for her ailing grandmother in Pine Level. She never returned back to school, but did obtain her high school diploma after she was married.
Skip ahead 26 years to December 1, 1955, on this day Rosa Parks changed the face of segregation in the south and unwittingly moved the civil rights movement into full force. The story of this day is well known by most individuals today, but at the time what she did was considered to be a criminal act. She was arrested for violation of the Montgomery city ordinance that stipulated the segregation of the public transit system. She did not do this violently, or with any kind of elaborate show, all she did was quietly refuse to surrender her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery City bus. She was arrested and fined $14.00 for her crime, which ended up costing the City of Montgomery tens of thousands of dollars in the following bus boycotts.
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