What Rosa Parks Did

Today, as America mourns the passing of Rosa Parks, we've noted that it was almost exactly 50 years ago — December 1, 1955 — that she committed the act of civil disobedience for which we've remembered her ever since. The mere act of refusing to give her seat at the front of the bus to a white person (as required by law) kickstarted the Montgomery bus boycott, the public career of Martin Luther King Jr., and the modern era of the Civil Rights movement.

But was there really anything "mere" about that act?

Consider that time and place: Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955. A world where the Ku Klux Klan still had a huge and visible presence in society. Jim Crow was at its height, and with their refusal to comply with the year-and-a-half-old Brown vs. Board of Education decision, the Southern states had shown they were ready and willing to defy the Constitution for the sake of institutional racism. In recent memory, integration's only real footholds had been in Major League Baseball and the armed forces, both of which must have seemed a million miles away.

Even more importantly, 14-year-old Emmett Till had been lynched in Money, Mississippi, on August 28 for ogling a white woman; photographs of his mangled body had appeared in Jet magazine on September 15. Just weeks before Parks's bus trip and only 300 miles away — it was excruciatingly fresh in the minds and perceptions of black Americans, and so were the horror and intimidation that accompanied it.

In that racially supercharged atmosphere, I can't imagine the tremendous courage it must have taken for Rosa Parks to look a white Alabama bus driver in the eye and tell him he'd have to have her arrested if he wanted her out of that seat. What could have flashed through her mind at that moment? Pictures of Emmett Till's corpse? Angry and jeering white mobs? The robes and hoods of the Klan?

Article Author: Michael J. West

Michael J. West is a writer, editor, and dilettante jazz critic in Washington, D.C. In addition to BlogCritics, he writes for JazzTimes, Washington City Paper, and AllAboutJazz.com. He occasionally writes at Pop Musicology, too. He's very cute. …

Visit Michael J. West's author page — Michael J. West's Blog