Rosa Parks

It was December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama.

A forty-two-year-old seamstress boarded the bus. She sat in the middle section.

She had not noticed the driver when she got on. It was James F. Blake.

In 1943, this same driver had ordered her off his bus, to re-board at the back. She got off, and she did not get back on. Since then, she had avoided his bus.

Rosa Louise McCauley was born on February 4, 1913, in Tuskegee. Her father was a carpenter, her mother a teacher.

She grew up mostly with her grandparents, on a small farm. At night, the Ku Klux Klan rode past. The child listened, in fear, to news of lynchings close to home.

In Montgomery, she attended the industrial school for girls. At sixteen, poverty and illness in the family forced her to stop. She earned her diploma later.

In 1932, she married Raymond Parks, a barber. Together, they joined the NAACP, the organization that defended the rights of Black Americans.

Rosa Parks became its secretary in Montgomery, from 1943 to 1956. She travelled across Alabama to listen to victims of discrimination. She gathered the words of witnesses to lynchings.

In 1944, the organization sent her to investigate the assault on Recy Taylor.

In the summer of 1955, she went to the Highlander Folk School, in Tennessee, with Septima Clark.

Then came that December day.

Blake ordered the Black passengers to give up their seats to white passengers. Rosa Parks stayed seated.

The driver threatened to have her arrested.

"You may do that," she answered.

He called the police. She did not move until the officers arrived. They arrested her for disorderly conduct.

She spent a short time in jail. She was fined fourteen dollars.

Later, she wrote:

She would also say she had been pushed around all her life, and at that moment she couldn't take it anymore.

On December 5, the day of her trial, Black residents of Montgomery boycotted the buses. It was meant to last one day. It lasted 381 days.

Some 17,000 people left the buses empty. A local pastor, Martin Luther King Jr., became a leader known across the country.

The Supreme Court ordered the buses integrated. The boycott ended on December 20, 1956.

For Rosa Parks, the price was high. She lost her job. She received death threats.

In 1957, she left for Detroit with her family. From 1965 to 1988, she worked for Congressman John Conyers. She helped homeless people find housing.

In 1987, the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development was founded, offering training to young Black people.

She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1996, then the Congressional Gold Medal in 1999.

Rosa Parks died in Detroit on October 24, 2005, at the age of ninety-two. Her casket lay in the Rotunda of the Capitol, in Washington. Some 40,000 people came to pay their respects.

She had not acted alone. Behind her seat were years of meetings and investigations. And after her, a whole city refused to ride. Her story echoes Ubuntu, the southern African way of thinking: a person becomes a person through other people.

Today, bus No. 2857 is on display at the Henry Ford Museum.

One woman stayed seated there. A whole city stood with her.