Rosa Parks

« Rosa Parks : She said NO While hardly one year ago (May 17 th ) the supreme Court decision « Brown et al.

v.

Board of Education of Topeka et al” declaring the racial segregation unconstitutional in the public schools was delivered, a new affair shakes again America. Indeed, Rosa Louise Mc Cauley, more collectively called Rosa Parks, made the news december 1st of this year in Montgomery, Alabama by refusing to give her place to a white person on the bus.

In this December 1st, 1955, Rosa Parks sits on a seat in a bus of the city of Montgomery. In the first place, the driver asks her to leave her seat to an white person, which did not have a place to sit down.

Seeing that instead of giving her place she stay seated thereby the bus driver,James Blake,decides ,in the second place, to call the police who arrest Rosa Parks.

She was moreover judged yesterday and condemned to pay a 15 dollar fine.

The reason of its gesture is that as so many others she was tired to give in and let people know it while remaining passive.Her arrest provoked a movement of protest and of support managed by a young preacher named Martin Luther King Jr.

w ho has called the blacks to boycott Montgomery's buses and founded the Montgomery Improvement Association .

Otherwise her resistance in front of bad treatments which the blacks undergo in buses and everyday in their life do not begin with this arrest.As a matter of fact if we redraw her story we notices from her childhood she evolves in an environment convenient to the evolution of her commitment for the cause of the civil rights for black people.

She was born on February 4 th , 1913 in Tsukugee,Alabama.

Her father is a carpenter and her mother is a primary school teacher, it is in addition with her that she lived, in the farm of her grandparents, further to their divorce.

She tells to have been a victim of racism and discriminations as her skin is black.

However her family always fought and still fights for the equality between the individuals and against the racism and this despite the threats of white supemacist groups such as the ku klux klan who paraded in front of her house.

On the contrary to certain black children she had the opportunity to learn to read and been able to study thanks to her mother.

At 19 years she marries with Raymond Parks, who is a member of the national association for the advancement of colored people ( NAACP ), an association which fights for the civil rights of the blacks.

This is why she joins the NAACP managed by Edgar Nixon as secretary, abandoning her work of needlewoman (from 1930 till 1955) as well as her miscellaneous other jobs such as nurse's aide.

Nevertheless her case is not the only one with for example Claudette Colvin a15-year-old girl arrested for the same motive and which was futhermore a part of a group of young people of the NAACP whose Rosa was a councillor.

Moreover she had been already confronted previously with the driver James Blake.

Actually,in 1945 w hen seeing that many people was blocking the access in the back she had decided to go directly at the bottom without coming down again but James Blake, angry, would have threatened her with his revolver and would have made her come down from the bus, forcing her to walk more than 8 km in the rain.

It was not thus the first time for Rosa Parks to dare to challenge the authorities.

But her courage will have contributed to the awareness of the Americans in the fight for the civil rights of the blacks? this is to you to judge and only the time will tell us.

One thing is sure this event is probably the trigger of all the frustration caused by segregation towards black people and the beginning of a struggle full of pitfalls. Louise Le Cam 1ère ES2. »