Sunday 7 February 2016

Rosa Parks Writes About Her Arrest

"I had been pushed around all my life and felt at this moment I couldn't take it anymore." 
(Rosa Parks)



Rosa Parks, who refused to give up her seat on an Alabama bus to a white person in 1955, helped spark the Civil Rights Movement.  While her name was forever etched on the history books, Parks paid a high price for her stance.  

Writing on a piece of Montgomery Department Store stationery, Parks explained:  

"I had been pushed around all my life and felt at this moment I couldn't take it anymore." When I asked the policeman why we had to be pushed around, he said he didn't know.  'The law is the law.  You are under arrest.'  I didn't resist." (http://www.vox.com/2015/2/4/7977373/rosa-parks-collection-documents)

The following year saw the Montgomery Bus Boycott, a successful tool to integrate public transportation in the city.  Parks lodged a protest against her arrest.  She was very much in the public eye.  Near the end of 1956, the seamstress was let go from her job at the Montgomery Department Store.  Her husband, who had been forbidden to discuss her case at work, was also let go from his position.  Old Jim Crow wasn't going to give up without a fight.

As Parks explained in her letter:

"little children are so conditioned early to learn their place in this segregated pattern as they take their first toddling steps and are weaned from their mother's breast."

In early 1957, Parks jumped through another hoop and secured her right to vote, at a time when few blacks had that right in the Deep South.  But the economic situation looked bleak in Alabama and Rosa and her husband Raymond moved to Detroit, Michigan by the early 1960's.  Rosa found work as a receptionist for a U. S. Congressman.  





*First published in 2015.


On Rosa’s ride to work and back

Down Cleveland Ave in fifty-five.

White bus driver Blake gave her flack,

But Rosa Parks would not move back.



Sewing suits from nine until five,

She did what she could to survive.

As more whites boarded, four blacks stalled.

Blake warned:  “Move back or I won’t drive!”



At six o’clock, Blake placed the call.

Police came and she took the fall.

Her only crime was being black.

She had paid her fare, after all.



Rosa’s bus ride launched the attack

On racist laws that hurt each black.

White bus driver Blake gave her flack,

But Rosa Parks would not move back.



Linda Jonasson
(August 28, 2008.)



Photo of Montgomery, Alabama bus at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan courtesy http://farm4.static.flickr.com.






Photo of Rosa Parks on Dec. 1, 1955 courtesy http://thegospelcoalition.org.

*First published in 2011.











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