Why was Rosa Parks important to the Black Civil Rights movement?
She was a black woman who would not give up her seat to any white man or woman in the front. She refused to obey the bus driver in that form. It sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which was a political and social protest that was started in 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, intended to oppose the city’s policy of racial segregation on its public transit system like the buses.
On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks (the “mother of the Civil Rights Movement”) refused to give up her seat on a public bus to make room for a white passenger. She was secretary of the Montgomery NAACP chapter and had recently returned from a meeting at the Highlander Center in Tennessee where nonviolent civil disobedience as a strategy had been discussed. Parks was arrested, tried, and convicted for disorderly conduct and violating a local ordinance. After word of this incident reached the black community, 50 African-American leaders gathered and organized the Montgomery Bus Boycott to demand a more humane bus transportation system. However, after any reforms were rejected the NAACP, led by E.D. Nixon, pushed for full desegregation of public buses. With the support of most of Montgomery’s 50,000 African Americans, the boycott lasted for 381 days until the local ordinance segregating African-Americans and whites on public buses was lifted.
It goes a little bit deeper than her just refusing to give up her seat. At the time she didn’t give up her seat she was secretary for the NAACP chapter in Montgomery, Alabama. So she was playing a major role in civil rights activism. And although she was not the first to refuse to give up her seat on a bus for a white person, her actions did set up the start of what would be come the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
