Thursday, December 1, 2011

Thank you Rosa!

Today is Rosa Parks Day. On December 1st, 56 years ago, a very tired Rosa Parks made a decision that would change her life and affect the civil rights movement.

Rosa Louise McCauley Parks (February 4, 1913 – October 24, 2005) was an African American civil rights activist and seamstress whom the U.S. Congress dubbed the "Mother of the Modern-Day Civil Rights Movement".

 Parks on a Montgomery bus on December 21, 1956, the day Montgomery's public transportation system 
was legally integrated. Behind Parks is Nicholas C. Chriss, a UPI reporter covering the event.

Parks is famous for her refusal on December 1, 1955 to obey bus driver James Blake's demand that she relinquish her seat to a white man. Her subsequent arrest and trial for this act of civil disobedience triggered the Montgomery Bus Boycott, one of the largest and most successful mass movements against racial segregation in history, and launched Martin Luther King, Jr., one of the organizers of the boycott, to the forefront of the civil rights movement. Her role in American history earned her an iconic status in American culture, and her actions have left an enduring legacy for civil rights movements around the world.

 The No. 2857 bus on which Parks was riding before she was arrested (a GM "old-look" transit bus
serial number 1132), is now a museum exhibit at the Henry Ford Museum.

Source: Wikipedia, Biography online
Photo credit: Wikipedia, Biography online

More Info:
Rosa's official website

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