Rosa Parks, born on the 4th of February in 1913, was an American activist in the civil rights movement best known for her pivotal role in the Montgomery Bus Boycott. U.S. Congress has called her "the first lady of civil rights" and "the mother of the freedom movement".
Parks was not the first person to resist bus segregation in Montgomery, but the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) believed that she was the best candidate for seeing through a court challenge after her 1955 arrest for refusing to give up her bus seat for a white person.
According to historian Dr. Casey Nichols, following this arrest, Parks immediately contacted local NAACP president E.D. Nixon and informed him of her arrest. Within hours, the Women’s Political Council (WPC), formed in 1946 to address the grievances of black bus patrons in Montgomery, sprang into action, printing flyers, phoning potential supporters, and organizing carpools.
The boycott succeeded in 1957 after the Supreme Court declared bus segregation unconstitutional. Parks' act of defiance and the Montgomery bus boycott became important symbols of the movement, and she became an international icon of resistance to racial segregation.
After the boycott's conclusion, Parks moved to Detroit, Michigan and began working as an assistant to Detroit Congressman John Conyers. She has received numerous honors, including over 40 honorary degrees, the Medal of Freedom, the Congressional Gold Medal of Honor, and two NAACP image awards. In 2002, Parks produced a biographical film titled “The Rosa Parks Story.”
"The only tired I was was tired of giving in."
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Rosa Parks
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Rosa Parks Biografy :rose-fist:
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claudette_Colvin
Claudette Colvin (born Claudette Austin; September 5, 1939) is an American pioneer of the 1950s civil rights movement and retired nurse aide. On March 2, 1955, she was arrested at the age of 15 in Montgomery, Alabama, for refusing to give up her seat to a white woman on a crowded, segregated bus. This occurred nine months before the more widely known incident in which Rosa Parks, secretary of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), helped spark the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott.
Colvin was one of four plaintiffs in the first federal court case filed by civil rights attorney Fred Gray on February 1, 1956, as Browder v. Gayle, to challenge bus segregation in the city. In a United States district court, she testified before the three-judge panel that heard the case. On June 13, 1956, the judges determined that the state and local laws requiring bus segregation in Alabama were unconstitutional. The case went to the United States Supreme Court on appeal by the state, and it upheld the district court's ruling on November 13, 1956. One month later, the Supreme Court affirmed the order to Montgomery and the state of Alabama to end bus segregation. The Montgomery bus boycott was then called off after a few months. Ultimately, the Supreme Court declared segregation on public transportation to be unconstitutional, as a result of Browder v. Gayle.
For many years, Montgomery's black leaders did not publicize Colvin's pioneering effort. Colvin has said, "Young people think Rosa Parks just sat down on a bus and ended segregation, but that wasn't the case at all." Colvin's case was dropped by civil rights campaigners because Colvin was unmarried and pregnant during the proceedings. It is now widely accepted that Colvin was not accredited by civil rights campaigners at the time due to her circumstances. Rosa Parks stated: "If the white press got ahold of that information, they would have [had] a field day. They'd call her a bad girl, and her case wouldn't have a chance."
The record of her arrest and adjudication of delinquency was expunged by the district court in 2021, with the support of the district attorney for the county in which the charges were brought more than 66 years before.