Death of Rosa Parks (1913-2005), Official Funeral Program.
Born Rosa Louise McCauley, in Tuskegee, Alabama, Rosa learned the importance of Black History in resisting racism and joined the NAACP in 1943. By the early 1950s she had befriended Asa Philip Randolph, Edgar Nixon, and Ella Baker, with whose instruction in the art of civil disobedience she would become a national hero.
Rosa’s moment in history came on December 1, 1955, when she was arrested for refusing to surrender her seat to a white male passenger on the orders of a Montgomery bus driver. In fact, that driver had kicked Rosa off the bus for doing exactly the same thing a dozen years earlier, but no one had noticed. In 1955, the results would be different.
The day following Rosa’s arrest, the Women’s Political Council called for a one-day, city-wide bus boycott. On December 5th, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was elected president of the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) which voted to extend the growing Montgomery Bus Boycott indefinitely. When both his and Edgar Nixon’s homes were bombed two months later, Dr. King called for peaceful protest rather than violent retribution. Meanwhile, Rosa’s bravery triggered a wave of protest that reverberated throughout the U.S. for more than a year. Finally, on Dec. 20, 1956, the Supreme Court ruled against segregation on city buses, and the next day Montgomery’s buses were officially desegregated, to which MIA ended its 381-day boycott.
Mrs. Parks also helped to integrate Montgomery’s public library so black children could have full access. In later years, she founded institutions to help them recognize and reach their full potential by appreciating Black History. She authored four books, and was awarded many distinguished prizes including the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal, as well as the Congressional Gold Medal of Honor.
In the evolution of Jim Crow racial discrimination to the public’s awareness of Civil Rights, the story of Rosa Parks exemplifies that change was not the result of inevitable social progress, but of individual and collective courage and sacrifice.