Rosa Parks: A True Activist

"Each person must live their life as a model for others."

                                                                                                                  Rosa Parks


In school I was taught that Rosa Parks was just a nice African American lady who refused to give up her seat on a bus. The entire story maybe took up about two paragraphs in my history book, but there is a lot more to this story that they don't teach you in school growing up. What I wasn't taught is that Rosa Parks was an activist for civil rights long before Martin Luther King Jr. came along.

Parks investigated rapes of African American women for the local chapter of the NAACP located in Montgomery, Alabama. The president of the local NAACP, E.D. Nixon, sent Parks to investigate the rape of an African American woman named Recy Taylor. The case became national news. Shortly after meeting Taylor, Rosa Parks started an organization in 1944 called the Alabama Committee for Equal Justice for Mrs. Recy Taylor. By the spring of 1945, they had recruited supporters from around the country.

Eleven years later, that same group Parks started came to be known as the Montgomery Improvement Association. After Rosa Parks refused to stand on that bus in December 1955, the Montgomery bus boycott began. During the bus boycott of Montgomery city buses, The Montgomery Improvement Association voted Martin Luther King Jr. as president, but when the organization first took root, Martin Luther King Jr. was in high school.

What the history books also don't teach you is that African Americans were abused for years on the Montgomery city buses. In fact, the bus driver in 1955 that demanded Rosa Parks stand up had had a previous altercation with her in 1943 when she refused to enter through the back of the bus after paying her fare at the front. 

There were many women before the Rosa Parks incident in 1955 who were taunted and abused by drivers on the Montgomery buses , but could not be put in the spotlight by civil rights groups looking to shed light on the situation because they did not have great reputations.

That's why, when E.D. Nixon heard of Rosa Park's arrest, he became ecstatic. In his own words, Parks could, "stand on her own two feet, she was honest, she was clean, she had integrity. The press couldn't go out and dig up something she did last year, or last month, or five years ago."

I don't think Rosa Parks was just an old woman with tired feet. I believe that as a civil rights worker, she would hear stories of abuse on those city buses all the time. I think she was standing up for all those who came before her. It's ironic that by staying seated she took a real stand.