In 1913, Rosa Parks was born in Alabama – one of the most segregated states in America. Her mother, Leona, was a teacher, and her father James was a carpenter, just like Jesus’ father. Humility was a concept rooted deep in the Parks family’s heritage, and their moral education started at a young age. One of Rosa Parks’ grandmothers had been an Indian slave. Rosa Parks was born at a time when the former Confederate states were adopting new constitutions and electoral laws that effectively disenfranchised black people (as well as many poor white voters) in Alabama. Because of the Jim Crow laws established by the Whites, adopted after the Democrats regained control of the southern states, racial segregation was imposed in public institutions and retail outlets, including public transport. Bus and train lines had seat allocation policies, with separate sections for Blacks and Whites. There was no school transport for black schoolkids in the south, and black education was under-financed. Park remembered going to primary school, where “school buses brought white kids to their new school while black students had to walk to theirs. I'd see the bus pass every day,” she said. “But to me, that was a way of life; we had no choice but to accept what was the custom. The bus was among the first ways I realized there was a black world and a white world”.
Rosa Parks was born into injustice, to an America that saw itself as deeply puritan and supremacist. Amidst the chaos of those times, her parents separated. Rosa Parks and her mother then moved to the suburb of Montgomery, where she attended the local Episcopal Church. She would have loved to be a gospel singer, but life held another fate in store for her. Rosa learned to sew from her mother, and proudly made her first dress at the age of eleven. As a student of the Montgomery Industrial School for girls, she took academic and occupational courses. Her school was set on fire twice, and reopened in a pitiable state. Teachers were attacked and threatened every day. Terror reigned in the classrooms. Rosa was often chased by the white kids from her neighborhood on her way home. At night, the Ku Klux Klan marched openly in the streets. Fortunately, her grandfather kept watch at the door with a rifle. He was the family’s protector, and fully intended to keep little Rosa safe from White hostility. Rosa Parks continued her studies in a school founded by the Alabama State Teachers College for Negroes, but stopped attending when her grandmother, and then her mother, fell ill.
On Thursday 1 December 1955, Rosa Parks, aged 42, was riding home on the bus after a long day’s work at the Montgomery Parks department store. Black folks in Montgomery avoided public buses whenever they could, given their degrading policy towards African-Americans. Nevertheless, two thirds of passengers were black, because black people tended to work farther from their homes, and today Rosa Parks was among them. Segregation was written into the law: the front of the bus was for whites, and the rear was for blacks. However, it was only through custom that bus drivers had the authority to ask a black person to give up their seat for a white passenger. In fact, local laws in Montgomery were contradictory on this point: one law said that segregation must be applied, but another – largely ignored – law stipulated that nobody, white or black, could be asked to give up their seat, even if no other seats were free. As such, on that day a white passenger was unable to find a seat, as all the places in the white section were occupied. The driver then asked the passengers seated on the first four seats in the first row of the “colored” section to get up, thereby adding another row to the “white” section. The first three passengers obeyed, but Rosa Parks did not.
Alan Alfredo Geday