9781422277843

C H A P T E R 1 UNDERARREST E ven for Montgomery, Alabama, where temperatures seldom fall below 40 degrees in the coldest months of winter, it was unusually hot on the first day of December 1955. It was nearly 5:30 p . m . when Rosa Parks put away the piles of new suits she was working on and left her job at the Montgomery Fair department store to board a bus for home. The petite, bespectacled woman had been raising and lowering hemlines, altering waistbands, and adjusting sleeve lengths all day at her job as a tailor’s assistant in the alterations department of the store. The holiday season was the busiest time of year for store workers, and this afternoon she was tired and her shoulders ached from bending over her sewing machine. As Rosa walked the half-block from the department store to the bus stop at Court Square, passing beneath the city’s Christmas decorations, she was thinking of all the work she still had to do at home that night. The square was decorated with red and green Christmas lights, and a large banner hung from one of the storefronts, pronouncing “Peace On Earth, Goodwill To Men.” Court Square in Montgomery, Alabama—the “Cradle of the Confederacy”—was a historic place. In 1861, Jefferson Davis’s inauguration as president of the Confederacy had taken place there, and slave auctions had been held on the site before the Civil War.

C H A P T E R 1 : U N D E R A R R E S T

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