Rosa Parks, Hero of Montgomery Bus Boycott, Dies
Rosa Parks, famous as the Montgomery, Alabama, seamstress who refused to give up her seat to a white person on the segregated Montgomery bus system on December 1, 1955, thereby sparking the famous Montgomery Bus Boycott, died on this day.
The bus boycott officially began on December 5, 1955, and is one of the iconic events of the civil rights movement.
In fact, however, racial segregation in the Montgomery buses was ended not by the boycott, but by a civil rights law suit: see March 2, 1955 and December 17, 1956.
Contrary to popular mythology, Rosa Parks had been very active in civic affairs prior to the Montgomery Bus Boycott and she continued to be after the boycott ended. But because of hostility to her in Montgomery because of her leadership on the bus issue, she decided to leave and moved to Detroit where other family members lived. She became a staff member for Congressman John Conyers and played an important role in handling community issues in his Detroit district. She often said that she found as much race discrimination in Detroit as she had in Montgomery, Alabama, although it was a different kind than in the south.
In 2016 the Library of Congress placed digital copies of the entire collection of the Rosa Parks Papers on its web site, making it readily available for browsing, learning, and research. The collection consists of 7,500 manuscript items and 2,500 photographs and prints. The collection is owned by the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, who has loaned it to the Library of Congress for 10 years. (Howard Buffett s the son of the famous investor Warren Buffett.)
Learn more at “Rosa Parks In Her Own Words” at the Library of Congress:
https://www.loc.gov/exhibitions/rosa-parks-in-her-own-words/about-this-exhibition/
Read her story: Rosa Parks, with Jim Haskins, Rosa Parks: My Story (1992)
Read Rosa Parks’ fascinating 1956 description of the boycott: http://www.crmvet.org/disc/parks_mbb.pdf
Watch a 1983 interview with Rosa Parks: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3h6s9jxZtE
Visit the Rosa Parks Library and Museum, Troy University, Montgomery, AL: http://visitingmontgomery.com/play/rosa-parks-library-museum-childrens-wing
Visit the National Museum of African American History and Culture here