An Act of Courage, The Arrest Records of Rosa Parks
www.archives.gov
On December 1, 1955, during a typical evening rush hour in Montgomery, Alabama, a 42-year-old woman took a seat on the bus on her way home from the Montgomery Fair department store where she worked as a seamstress. Before she reached her destination, she quietly set off a social revolution when the bus driver instructed her to move back, and she refused. Rosa Parks, an African American, was arrested that day for violating a city law requiring racial segregation of public buses. On the city buses of Montgomery, Alabama, the front 10 seats were permanently reserved for white passengers.

December 1 is the anniversary of the arrest of Rosa Parks in 1955. Her crime was refusing to move rearward in the bus to make room for white people.

Under the law, the first 10 seats were reserved for whites only. She sat in the row behind those seats on her way home from work. But as the bus filled up, the bus driver instructed her to move back in order to make room for additional white people. When she refused, the driver called the police. She was arrested, fingerprinted, and briefly imprisoned, thankfully without the customary beating.

But what the police didn’t know was that the black community was waiting for such a thing to happen. Rosa Parks’ character was unassailable, and her “crime” was pretty obviously made up. Nowhere in the bus laws did it state that the bus driver could arbitrarily change which seats had priority white seating. Although she lost in court, and was forced to pay a $14 fine, it did spark a whole new chapter in the fight for equality in the US.

The black community boycotted the buses, and staged large protests. It was here that Martin Luther King Jr. first achieved national fame. These protests would eventually lead to the forced desegragation of the US. Minorities still fight for equality in the US, but this day marked a turning point.