Stay Seated

Sixty years go today, Montgomery, AL seamstress Rosa Parks declined a bus driver's order to give her seat to a white man and move to the rear of her bus. Her subsequent arrest sparked a bus boycott that played a large role in reclaiming civil rights for African-Americans and ending segregation laws.

That Ms. Parks was not the first person to be arrested for such a refusal and that she was an officer in a local NAACP chapter doesn't detract from her actions. She received many threats because of the high profile of her case, and its circumstances led civil rights organizations to choose it as a vehicle to obtain a Supreme Court ruling on segregation laws. The local activist groups met and elected a new young Baptist minister as their president, putting Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., into a role which he would use to transform a country.

Montgomery's black citizens, in protest of the bus segregation, boycotted its buses for more than a year until the city repealed its laws. They either took black-owned cabs, whose drivers charged only bus fare prices for those going to and from work, or walked -- some as much as 20 miles.

Rev. King would later say that Ms. Parks' arrest was the catalyst for the Montgomery movement more than its cause, which is probably a good way to see it. The injustice she suffered was small only when compared to the lynchings, beatings and cruelty visited on African-Americans throughout the country in years following the Civil War and into the 20th century. But the optics of the indignity forced upon this dignified woman crystallized that injustice in a way that removed the option of looking away and made change a reality.