Okay...so
today is February 14. And, apparently it's a day that is supposed to
be about true love and devotion, when in reality, it's all about
making sure that you buy jewelry, roses, and chocolate hearts filled
with Reese's Peanut Butter.
But,
in today's blog, I want to do my Thursday Diary Entry on somebody
incredibly special. Someone whose face has been associated with the
modern civil rights movement. Someone who stood up for her rights,
and ended up changing the course of history forever.
And,
if I ever fell in love with someone who had the same strong
determination for what she believed in...I could consider myself
lucky.
February
14, 2013
It
has been quite a long time since I have boarded a bus. Do you know
that?
Of
course, I currently live in a small community where bus service runs
for a limited amount of time (I can't say for certain, but I'm
probably not wrong in saying that buses in town rarely run past seven
o'clock in the evening on weekdays). And besides, in my town, I can
get to almost anywhere I want to go in as little as half an hour by
walking.
Back
in the days when I used to live in Ottawa, Ontario (circa 2001), I
would ride OC Transpo nearly every day to get to where I wanted to
go. It was a really easy system to navigate back in those days
(though I am sure that there will be some who will disagree with me).
You would give the bus driver your bus fare (or bus pass if you
owned one), and you would get a ticket. That ticket doubled as a bus
transfer pass, so that if you needed to change bus routes during your
trip, you could within a two-hour window.
Some
people in Ottawa really hated taking the bus, and you could
definitely see it in their faces as they squeezed into the available
seats. I can understand, having been one who frequently had to stand
in the aisles of the bus because there weren't enough seats
available. But the thing is that I didn't mind. It was cool to look
around the bus and see people of all different backgrounds chatting
away.
It
just seems so hard to believe that there was once a time in history
in which that wasn't always the case.
Take
the city of Montgomery, Alabama for example in...oh, let's go with
1955. Back in those days, the ugliness known as segregation was
rearing its ugly head. Kids who were white could ride the bus to
their schools while black kids had to walk. There were separate
eating establishments and boutiques for people depending on what
colour their skin was. Believe it or not, even drinking fountains
were segregated. It was not a great time period in history, and I
can't even begin to imagine how hard it was for people who were of
African-American descent back in those days.
Even
seats on buses were assigned according to race. In most cases, the
front seats of the bus were reserved for white people, while people
of colour were seated at the back of the bus. Most of the times,
this went without incident, but if more white passengers were on the
bus at the time, then the sign that divided the seats was pushed back
by the bus driver in order to accommodate the white riders. If you
happened to be black, you did not get the same treatment. In fact,
black passengers had to enter the bus through the rear door instead
of the side door! It seems absolutely crazy to picture passengers
boarding a bus from the rear, but back in the 1950s, it was normal.
It was unfortunately also normal for black passengers to be thrown
off the bus if the bus was overcrowded.
And,
this was the case until December 1, 1955, when one woman decided that
she wasn't going to take it anymore.
Mind
you, this was not the first instance in which Rosa Parks fought back
against the unjust laws surrounding the public transit system and its
laws in Montgomery, Alabama. Twelve years earlier, in 1943, a
thirty-year-old Parks boarded the bus, paid her fare, and sat down in
the section reserved for black passengers. However, she had entered
through the side door of the bus instead of the rear entrance, and
the bus driver on duty, James F. Blake, told her to follow the city
rules. Parks left the bus and approached the back of the bus...only
for the bus to pull away before she could get back inside. She ended
up having to walk home in the rain. Nice, huh?
Well,
wouldn't you know it? A dozen years later, and she found herself
once again on a bus driven by James F. Blake. And, this time around,
she was not going to let him walk all over her.
On
that fateful December day in 1955, Parks once more paid her fare and
sat down in the row that was directly behind the “whites-only”
section of the bus. During the course of the ride, the seats that
were reserved for white passengers filled up very quickly, and by the
time that the bus pulled up for its third stop of the route, there
was a problem.
The
bus driver had noticed that the entire white section of the bus was
filled, and that two or three white passengers were left standing in
the aisle of the bus. So, Blake got up once the bus was stopped,
moved the “Coloured People Only” sign back a row (the same row
that Parks was seated in), and ordered the four black passengers in
the row to give up their seats so that the white passengers could sit
down, keeping in mind that if any of the black passengers refused to
give up their seats, they could be arrested and sent to jail.
With
the threat of an arrest record, three of the four passengers
immediately forfeited their seats. Wanna take a stab as to which one
didn't move?
Rosa
Parks had just worked a super long day. She was not about to give up
her seat as quickly as the others. If anything, she moved to a
window seat so that it would make it harder to get out! Blake was
furious, and practically ordered Parks to give up her seat, but she
was not going to. She was tired of being pushed around, and she was
tired of having to settle for second-best because of the colour of
her skin. She wanted equality for everyone.
Blake
even threatened to call the police on Parks if she didn't move. And
when Parks held firm on her stance, that's exactly what Blake did.
She later explained in her autobiography “My Story” that the
reason she chose not to give up her seat wasn't because she was
physically tired. She was tired of giving in to the social stigma
that seemed to be present throughout the Southern states during the
mid-1950s.
Parks
was charged with a violation of the segregation law of the Montgomery
city code (even though she technically didn't break a law as she was
sitting in a seat reserved for a black person before the bus driver
moved the sign), and you can see her mugshot above.
But
if you think the story ends here...you're mistaken.
The
arrest of Rosa Parks prompted the event known as the “Montgomery
Bus Boycott”.
The
plans for the boycott began preparations on December 4, 1955 (three
days after Parks was arrested). Jo Ann Robinson (a member of the
Women's Political Council) mimeographed several thousand copies of
the paper announcing the boycott, and the paper was distributed
around black churches. The announcement also made the pages of “The
Montgomery Advertiser”, and the people who lead the boycott made it
clear that it would continue until black bus drivers were hired, and
until seating was given on a first come, first serve basis.
On
December 5, 1955 (the same day as Rosa's trial), the boycott
officially began, and although there was a bad rainstorm that day,
African-American passengers stayed off the buses. Some carpooled,
some took cabs, but the majority of the people opted to use their
feet. Some people even walked to their destinations for miles and
miles, just to support Rosa Parks!
And,
do you know just how long that boycott lasted? Three hundred and
eighty-one days! That's just a little over one year! Can you
imagine just how much money that system lost because of this? Kind
of makes one rethink the whole idea of segregation, doesn't it?
In
the end, the boycott was well worth it. On December 21, 1956, a new
law was passed, which allowed Montgomery's public transit system to
become completely integrated. Of course, while Rosa Parks' standoff
on the bus kickstarted the movement, it was helped along by the
Montgomery Improvement Association, which among others had a future
civil rights activist on its team...Martin Luther King Jr.
As
for Parks...well, she was charged with disorderly conduct, and
violating a local ordinance, and after a trial that lasted a mere
half hour, she was fined ten dollars, plus an additional four more
for the trial cost. But her arrest also helped integrate an entire
city's transportation system. So, I suppose it was a nice tradeoff.
Now,
Rosa and her husband had to leave Montgomery in 1957 after they both
lost their jobs because of the case...but they eventually settled in
Detroit, Michigan, where Parks lived the rest of her life. She
suffered a lot of hardships during her time in Michigan (including
losing her husband, brother, and mother all died within a very short
period), but she was always a crusader for the civil rights movement.
She worked for an African-American United States Representative
named John Conyers as his secretary until the 1980s, and co-founded
the Rosa L. Parks Scholarship Foundation in 1980. She was a
co-founder of the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for
Self-Development in 1987, and published two memoirs in 1992 and 1995,
detailing her life and times. I would actually encourage everyone to
read both books, because she was one interesting lady.
Perhaps
one of the coolest stories that I remember hearing happened in 1994,
when the Ku Klux Klan wanted to purchase a stretch of Interstate 55
for clean-up. The state government of Missouri couldn't refuse the
KKK's sponsorship...but they could decide what to name the stretch of
road. And, so, the stretch of highway was renamed “Rosa Parks
Highway”!
How's
that for irony?
Rosa
Parks passed away of natural causes in Detroit, Michigan on October
24, 2005 at the age of 92. And, in those ninety-two years, she
helped change the face of the world forever simply by refusing to
give up her seat on a bus fifty years earlier. I only wish that I
could do something half as memorable if I ever live that long.
This
past February 4, Rosa Parks would have turned one hundred years old.
And, because of that, several places all over the world held 100th
birthday celebrations in memory of Rosa and her contributions. But,
I'm sure that if Rosa were still alive today, she'd probably act all
embarrassed by the honour. After all, she never did what she did for
the fame, or the money, or the personal karma. She did it to make it
easier for people of all races to enjoy life and live life, and not
have to worry about who they were any longer.
Rosa
Parks...I salute you.
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