A History of the Civil Rights Movement

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A History of the Civil Rights Movement

year-old Claudette Colvin for refusing to give a white passenger her bus seat. On October 21, officers arrested 18-year-old Mary Louise Smith for the same “crime.” Then on Thursday, December 1, 1955, the most famous act of American civil disobedience occurred. It involved 42-year-old Rosa Parks, who was leaving work when she got onto a Montgomery bus. Parks sat down in the first row of the bus’s “colored” section—the seats from the middle to the back. After passengers filled all the seats, a white man was left standing. Another black man sat by Parks, in the window seat. Two black women sat across the aisle from Parks. The bus driver, James F. Blake, told the four black riders, “Let me have those seats.” No one moved. Blake said “Y’all better make it light on yourselves and let me have those seats.” The man and two women stood. But Parks scooted into the window seat. In her autobiography My Story she said, “I could not see how stand ing up was going to ‘make it light’ on me. The more we gave in, [the worse they treated us].” Parks told Blake that she would not stand. He said, “I’m going to have you arrested.” She replied “You may do that.” Two police officers entered the bus. One asked Parks why she wouldn’t stand. She answered, “Why do you all push us around?” The police officers took Parks to jail. BUS BOYCOTT BEGINS Within a few hours of Rosa Parks’s arrest, Jo Ann Robinson heard the news. Robinson, an English professor at the all-black Alabama State College in Montgomery, was president of the Women’s Political Council (WPC), a civil rights group of 300 women. For years, the WPC and other groups had talked about boycotting Montgomery’s buses. In 1953, Robinson had sent a letter to the mayor of Montgomery, William Gayle, warning that African Americans would stop riding the buses if the abuses didn’t stop. Robinson knew that African-Americans riders were important to the bus company. Three-quarters of the bus passengers were black, and if they stopped riding the bus company would lose a lot of money.