The mother of Civil Rights Movement
Rosa Parks was a black woman, she was a tailor living in Montgomery (Alabama). One day, it was 1st of December 1955 she took the bus to go back home after the day work.
She sat on a seat reserved to white people and when the bus driver, James Blake, ordered her to give up her sit to a white passenger she refused. The bus driver called the police and she was sent to prison.
The police arrested her because she was breaking the segregation law which put separated seats for black people on buses. In Alabama, white people could sit at the front of the buses but blacks couldn’t.
Segregation laws were common in many Southern States in the United States.
Blak Americans and white Americans went to separate schools and hospitals. They sat in different seats on buses and had separate areas in restaurants. They couldn’t get good jobs or houses, and in these areas many African- Americans couldn’t vote. They were also often attacked by white people.
Rosa and most African- Americans were tired of this discrimination. After the arrest, local African-Americans stopped travelling by bus as a protest.
They didn’t use the buses for 382 days. They boycotted the use of buses so the bus company didn’t get a lot of money. All the newspapers around the world spoke about this event and finally the Supreme Court decided that racial segregation on public transport was illegal.
Rosa Parks’s protest strengthened the Civil Rights Movement in the United States.
The movement wanted to abolish segregation laws and stop racial discrimination. The success of the boycott showed them that they had the power to change their situation .
One of the leaders of the movement was Martin Luther King who led the African –Americans in a long fight for equality. Unfortunately, King was assassinated in 1968.
Only 50 years later ,in January 2009, Barack Obama became the first African –American President of the United States. It was a historic moment. The Unites States, and the world, have become very different places since Rosa Parcks’s protest.
Rosa Parcks died on 24th October 2005. She was 92 years old. She inspired a lot of people, and many people called her “the Mother of the Civil Rights Movement”