Parks and Colvin: The Icon and Non-Celebrity Darryl R. Barkley ENG 220 December 22, 2014 Professor Marie Loggia-Kee Parks and Colvin: The Icon and Non-Celebrity Throughout the Jim Crow era, many African Americans rebelled against segregated seating in public transportation, but their number vastly increased after World War II (Schwartz, 2009). In 1955, racial segregation on buses in Montgomery, Alabama, ignited what is historically known as the Montgomery Bus Boycott. While the boycott lead to a decision by the Supreme Court to end segregated seating, it would not have been possible without the sacrifices made by Rosa Parks and Claudette Colvin. Both Parks and Colvin, upon boarding the National City Lines Bus
Key Features The official start of the boycott was on December 1st 1955. Rosa Parks, a black seamstress, had refused to give up her seat to a white man on the Montgomery Bus service. Rosa Parks was an educated woman, a long-time member of the NAACP and had completed a course on “Race Relations” in the Highlander Folk School, Tennessee. She was subsequently arrested, which sparked outrage among the black community. The MIA(Montgomery Improvement Association) was formed with Martin Luther King as president.
The NAACP’s momentum to keep fighting came from the victories it has won. Many people are a part of African American history today were involved in many ways to help fight desegregate the South. Thurgood Marshall, a lawyer, was the critique of the “separate but equal” doctrine that justified segregation. Thurgood Marshall won a number of significant cases, Morgan v. Virginia (1946), Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada (1938) and Sweatt v. Painter (1950).
The Birmingham movement was a campaign organized by the SCLC to draw attention to the unfair treatment endured by blacks in Birmingham, Alabama. The movement ran throughout the spring of 1963, resulting in highly publicized confrontations between the youths of the African American communities and white authorities. King knew it would take more than demonstrations to come out victorious, and he knew exactly what it would take: children. To have youth demonstrators, to King, would open the nations eyes to the evil that he had been trying to expose for so long. Children are children, regardless of race, and King knew that the mistreatment of these children would expose the violence that had been ever-present in Birmingham.
Take Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. for example, Dr. King played a significant role in the Civil Rights Movement that led to the desegregation of the South. There are some cities and states that refuse to have a street or even a park named after him. According to Schaefer, “Efforts to recognize significant figures in African American history have often been controversial. There are only 650 cities in 41 states that have renamed streets in honor of the late and great Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.” Oh my dear friend when will we all love and live as one as Dr. King wanted? Another issue my people haven faced for some time is racial profiling and here lately it has been on the hot seat!
The United States experienced a dramatic shift in the avenue of racial discrimination with the end of the African-American Civil rights movement in the 1960’s and 1970’s. The purposes of these social movements were to arouse national awareness towards racial equality and successfully led to the official and legal recognition of abolishing racial discrimination. Yet like many areas throughout the country, my small rural hometown of Oxford, North Carolina was not quite ready to accept this integration. In May of 1970, Oxford was the stage of the tragic racially inclined murder of Henry ‘Dickie’ Marrow by several white oppressors known as the Teel brothers. This act of violence eventually went on to lead to several continuous retaliatory instances
However some men and women did stand up against this treatment and fought for their civil rights and for this they are preserved in history for their bravery. One of these people was Rosa Parks who many historians believed sparked the modern civil rights movement in America in December 1955. She unintentionally became an inspiration to thousands of African American citizens with her simple act of defiance on a bus one a cold, wet night on December 1st 1955. In this essay I am going to explore the life of Rosa Parks and how it led up to that night in December when she finally said enough was enough. Rosa Parks was born in Tuskegee, Alabama in February 1913.
On Monday 5th December 1955 Montgomery Alabama, cradle of the confederacy , bore witness to the largest display of resistance any southern state had ever experienced before. Over 50 thousand of the city’s African American population refused to ride the city’s segregated buses in protest over continued harassment and ill treatment suffered at the hands of white bus drivers. The incident that finally tipped the balance was the arrest of an African American woman called Rosa Parks, her crime was refusing to vacate her, unreserved seat in order to allow a white man to sit down, only four days earlier. The city’s empty buses became a striking symbol of the power that black citizens of Montgomery possessed. Despite having virtually no rights in white dominated society they were the bus company’s customers, the power they possessed was exactly that.
On December 1, 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama one of America’s most famous protests went down in history. After a long day of work, rosa parks refusing to give up her seat in the front if the bus eventually lead to a Bus boycott, leading her into becoming an activist. She started out with an indivisual protest that led to a large social protest and a Supreme Court case. The small protest led to a change in American life. The Rosa Park’s protest in Montgomery Alabama was on of the most important event of the Civil Rights Movement because it was one of the first victories for African-Americans in the movement, it changed the everyday lives of both African-American and White-American people, it helped Martin Luther King Jr. become one of the movements
The story is often told with that being the day when the black people of Montgomery, Alabama, democratically decided that they would boycott the city buses until they could sit anywhere they wanted, instead of being relegated to the back when a white boarded. What many people do not know is that day was not the day that the movement to desegregate the buses started. Of all the people who played a role in the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Rosa Parks is the most known. The simple story we are taught in elementary school leaves out many significant people such as Jo Ann Robinson, who absentmindedly sat in the front of an empty bus only to be sent off in tears from the bus driver yelling at her. After Jo’s traumatic experience on the bus in 1945 she tried to start a protest but was turned down when the other woman of the Woman’s Political Council brushed off the incident as “a fact of life in Montgomery.” (Cozzens, 1997) About nine years later, after the Supreme Court ruled that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional, Jo wrote a letter to W.A.