One late December afternoon in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks boarded a city bus to return to her home. This was 1955. She was a seamstress and worked in the large department store in that city. She was black so she had to sit in the back of the segregated bus, while black passengers were told to give up their seats to white passengers. That day Rosa Parks refused to get up.
She was arrested for breaking the law of segregation, she was finger-printed and she was jailed. And she made the news!
As she writes in Quiet Strength, “I knew it was time to say ‘No, not this time.’ I was tired, not because I had worked all day and wanted to get home, but because I was tired of social injustice, and did not believe a woman should be forced to stand so that a man could sit down.”
That day she had no idea she was pioneering the civil rights movement in the South with her defiance. Within days after her arrest, the black community in Montgomery united to organize a boycott of the city buses--a boycott that was successful, lasted 381 days and almost bankrupted the bus company. Other black communities in the South took heart and staged their own bus boycotts, plus sit-ins and eat-ins.
The non-violent civil rights movement had begun. Rosa Parks’ court case was argued to the U.S. Supreme Court.
On December 21, 1956, that high court declared bus segregation unconstitutional. Four decades later, in 1994, Rosa Parks, in this her second book, looks back at her quiet defiance in 1955 as an act of faith and says, “I felt the Lord would give me the strength to endure whatever I had to do. It was time to stand up, or in my case, sit down. I refused to move.”
She tells her story quite simply as she recalls events in her life, the importance of religion, and her inborn belief in freedom. Now living in Detroit, Michigan, for many years, she has continued to work for the cause of civil rights.
“Discrimination,: she says, “is still alive in our country, and I am not discouraged. We must continue to struggle for equality.”
He first book Rosa Parks: My Story, written with Jim Haskins, New York, Dial Books, c1992, is her detailed biography. Born in rural Alabama, she was raised by a strong mother and strong grandparents, who instilled in her pride in her heritage. Her husband encouraged her to join the NAACP, finish her education, and register to vote. Early on, Rosa was active in the civil rights movement long before the bus boycott in 1955 and she was a tireless speaker for the civil rights movement long after the boycott.
I found her account to be straightforward throughout this book and I sensed her deep and life-long dedication to the cause of equality.
The Westerville Public Library has copies of both of Rosa Parks’ books.
