Until the nineteen sixties, black people in many parts of the United States did not have t

he same civil rights as white people. Laws in the American South kept tile two races separate. These laws forced black people to attend separate schools, live in separate areas of a city and sit in separate areas on a bus.

On December first, nineteen fifty-five, in the southern city of Montgomery, Alabama, a forty-two year old black woman got on a city bus. The law at that time required black people seated in one area of the bus to give up their seats to white people who wanted them. The woman refused to do this and was arrested. This act of peaceful disobedience started protests in Montgomery that led to legal changes in minority rights in the United States. The woman who started it was Rosa Parks. Today, we tell her story.

She was born Rosa Louise McCauley in nineteen-thirteen in Tuskegee, Alabama. She attended local schools until she was eleven years old. Then she was sent to school in Montgomery. She left high school early to care for her sick grandmother, then to care for her mother. She did not finish high school until she was twenty-one. Rosa married Raymond Parks in nineteen thirty-two. He was a barber who cut men's hair. He was also a civil rights activist. Together, they worked for the local group of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In nineteen forty-three, Missus Parks became an officer in the group and later its youth leader.

Rosa Parks was a seamstress in Montgomery. She worked sewing clothes from the nineteen thirties until nineteen fifty-five. Then she became a representation of freedom for millions of African-Americans. In much of the American South in the nineteen riffles, the first rows of seats on city buses were for white people only. Black people sat in the back of the bus. Both groups could sit in a middle area. However, black people sitting in that part of the bus were expected to leave their seats if a white person wanted to sit there. Rosa Parks and three other black people were seated in the middle area of the bus when a white person got on the bus and wanted a seat. The bus driver demanded that all four black people leave their seats so the white person would not have to sit next to any of them. The three other blacks got up, but Missus Parks refused. She was arrested. Some popular stories about that incident include the statement that Rosa Parks refused to leave her seat because her feet were tired. But she herself said in later years that this was false. What she was really tired of, she said, was accepting unequal treatment. She explained later that this seemed to be the place for her to stop being pushed around and to find out what human rights she had, if any.

A group of black activist women in Montgomery was known as the Women's Political Council. The group was working to oppose the mistreatment of black bus passengers. Blacks had been arrested and even killed for violating orders from bus drivers. Rosa Parks was not the first black person to refuse to give up a seat on the bus for a white person. But black groups in Montgomery considered her to be the right citizen around whom to build a protest because she was one of the finest citizens of the city.

The women's group immediately called for all blacks in the city to refuse to ride on city buses on the day of Missus Parks' trial, Monday, December fifth. The result was that forty thousand people walked and used other transportation on that day. That night, at meetings throughout the city, blacks in Montgomery agreed to continue to boycott the city buses until their mistreatment stopped. They also demanded that the city hire black bus drivers and that anyone be permitted to sit in the middle of the bus and not have to get up for anyone else. The Montgomery bus boycott continued for three hundred eighty-one days. It was led by local black leader E.D. Nixo

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