“Parks wrote poetically about how life under Jim Crow ‘walks us on a tightrope from birth’-demonizing so-called ‘troublemakers’ and requiring a “major mental acrobatic feat” to survive. The sentence appears in previously unseen notes in an archive of Parks’ personal papers that opened and underscores a lesser-known dimension of her life: Far from being a meek seamstress who just happened to defy authorities that December evening, she was a fierce and persistent political activist nearly her whole life…” “I had been pushed around all my life and felt at this moment that I couldn’t take it anymore.” Rosa Parks wrote those words just a short time after her famous refusal, 60 years ago, to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama city bus, a protest that galvanized a yearlong bus boycott and opened a new chapter in the struggle for American civil rights. In protest of the unjust Alabama law that required African Americans to sit in the back of the bus, her civil disobedience inspired the 381-day long Montgomery Bus Boycott, and moved the Supreme Court to ban segregation on public transportation in 1956.įrom Smithsonian Magazine on The Rosa Parks Collection: On December 1st, 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested when she bravely refused to surrender her bus seat to a white passenger.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |