Rosa Parks

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus and was arrested. Her courageous action galvanized a yearlong community boycott and helped usher in a new chapter of the Black freedom struggle. Her bus stand was part of a lifetime of courage and political activism. Born in Tuskegee and raised in Pine Level, Alabama, Rosa Parks spent nearly twenty-five years of her adult life in Montgomery, tilling the ground for a broader movement for racial justice to flower. Joining a small cadre of activists in transforming Montgomery’s NAACP into a more activist chapter, she served as secretary of the branch for most of the next twelve years and in the late 1940s was elected secretary for the Alabama state conference of the NAACP. Through the organization, she pressed for voter registration, documented white brutality and sexual violence, pushed for desegregation, and fought criminal injustice in the decade after WWII. Coming home from work that December evening, she was asked by bus driver James Blake to give up her seat on a segregated Montgomery bus. “Pushed as far as she could stand to be pushed” she refused and was arrested. That act of courage galvanized a year-long community boycott of Montgomery’s segregated buses, catapulting a young Martin Luther King Jr. to national attention and leading to the Supreme Court’s decision ordering the desegregation of Montgomery’s buses. Parks’s act and the bus boycott it produced is often seen as the opening act of the modern civil rights movement which rippled across the South and culminated in the passage of the Civil and Voting Rights Acts. Facing continued death threats and unable to find work, the Parks family was forced to leave Montgomery eight months after the boycott’s end for Detroit, where her brother and cousins lived. While the public signs of segregation were thankfully gone, she didn’t find “too much difference” between the extent of housing and school segregation they encountered in the North from that of the South. And so she spent the second half of her life fighting the racism of the North. Awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal, when she died in October 2005 she became the first civilian, the first woman, and the second African American to lie in honor in the US Capitol. In February 2013, a statue in her honor was installed in the US Capitol’s Statuary Hall, the first full statue of a Black person to be put there. Parks is arguably one of the most known and regarded Americans of the 20th century. Yet the story that is regularly told and taught is clouded with myth and misinformation—wrongly asserting that Parks was tired, old, meek, middle-class, and/or an accidental actor. On top of these distortions of her bus stand, most people would be hard-pressed to go beyond that courageous moment on the bus to anything else about her life. Corresponding to this tendency, although children’s and young adult books on her abound, scholarly work focused on Parks is surprisingly thin. Scholars of civil rights history, postwar American history North and South, and American politics have largely not paid in-depth attention to Parks in order to investigate other activists in Montgomery, earlier struggles than the bus boycott, and other movements outside of Montgomery. While this provides needed and important dimensions to our knowledge of the period, it leaves our knowledge of Parks’ history incomplete—until Jeanne Theoharis’s ground-breaking biography The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks. Parks herself wrote an autobiography aimed at young adults that serves as one of the best accounts of her bus stand, the activism that lead up to it, and the boycott that ensued.

Using Counterstories and Reflective Writing Assignments to Promote Critical Race Consciousness in an Undergraduate Teacher Preparation Course

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white patron on a Montgomery bus. Her act of resistance sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott and ushered in the mid-20th century Civil Rights Movement. Although Parks occupies a prominent place in United States history, she was not the first to challenge racial segregation. Elizabeth Jennings was an African American schoolteacher who was ejected from a streetcar in New York City in 1854. Her lawyer, future President Chester A. Arthur, sued the streetcar company and won. Jennings' and Parks' stories serve as examples of counterstories that can raise critical race consciousness to matters of racial inequity in historical narratives and school curricula. Therefore, the purpose of this chapter is to examine whether students in an undergraduate teacher preparation course at a major university in a metropolitan region of the Southeast demonstrated critical race consciousness with reflective writing assignments by analyzing the counterstories of Elizabeth Jennings and Rosa Parks.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Racial Basis for Interstate Highways and Urban Renewal

This article analyzes how Interstate Highways were used in Montgomery, Alabama, to maintain racial hierarchies during the civil rights movement, how the routing of Interstate Highways through Montgomery changed over time, and the connections between Interstate Highway routing and the racially volatile political environment after the Montgomery Bus Boycott. To address these issues, the article analyzes the planning of the Interstate Highways and the Urban Renewal areas in the city. The article concludes that highway engineering in Montgomery took a more racially motivated turn after the Bus Boycott with the rise of a racially charged political environment in 1959.

Desegregation of City Parks and the Civil Rights Movement: The Case of Oak Park in Montgomery, Alabama

This article analyzes the history of desegregation of city parks in Montgomery, Alabama. The article chronicles the sixteen-year legal battle to desegregate parks in Montgomery and the efforts of city officials to keep parks segregated, including closing all of the parks for seven years, contracting with the Montgomery YMCA to operate segregated private recreation facilities, and allowing only segregated schools to use the parks. The article explores the connection between park segregation and the Montgomery Bus Boycott and school segregation, and questions why public officials fought to keep parks segregated after other public facilities began court-ordered desegregation, and why the story of park desegregation in Montgomery is largely unknown. The article concludes with a call to confront the history of park segregation in Montgomery.

Our Aims Are High and Our Determinations Deep

This chapter discusses the history of Alabama State University during the crucial period between the New Negro Era and the rise of the modern civil rights movement. It was during this period that Montgomery, Alabama became a launching point for one of the most important protests in American history – the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Yet few understand the crucial role that Alabama State University played in sowing the seeds of that movement by training the leadership that helped to carry it out, and generating a spirit of resistance long before the boycotts took place. It was the members of the Women’s Political Council, a group of educators teaching at ASU, that designed the ideas for a massive boycott, and it was their leadership on campus, alongside the college president Harper Councill Trenholm, that transformed that campus into one of the most militant centers for student activism in the deep south. The campus soon came under the watchful eye of Jim Crow legislatures who controlled the purse strings and held the keys to the institution, but not before the communitas of ASU summoned the vision and the will to carry out their own sit-in protests in downtown Montgomery.

Chemists Who Work in Industry

Dr. Dorothy J. Phillips (Fig. 2.1) is a retired industrial chemist and a member of the Board of Directors of the ACS. Dorothy Jean Wingfield was born in Nashville, Tennessee on July 27, 1945, the third of eight children, five girls and three boys. She was the second girl and is very close to her older sister. Dorothy grew up in a multi- generational home as both her grandmothers often lived with them. Her father, Reverend Robert Cam Wingfield Sr., born in 1905, was a porter at the Greyhound Bus station and went to school in the evenings after he was called to the ministry. He was very active in his church as the superintendent of the Sunday school; he became a pastor after receiving an associate’s degree in theology and pastoral studies from the American Baptist Theological Seminary. Her mother, Rebecca Cooper Wingfield, occasionally did domestic work. On these occasions, Dorothy’s maternal grandmother would take care of the children. Dorothy’s mother was also very active in civic and school activities, attending the local meetings and conferences of the segregated Parent Teachers Association (PTA) called the Negro Parent Teachers Association or Colored PTA. For that reason, she was frequently at the schools to talk with her children’s teachers. She also worked on a social issue with the city to move people out of the dilapidated slum housing near the Capitol. The town built government subsidized housing to relocate people from homes which did not have indoor toilets and electricity. She was also active in her Baptist church as a Mother, or Deaconess, counseling young women, especially about her role as the minister’s wife. When Dorothy went to school in 1951, Nashville schools were segregated and African American children went to the schools in their neighborhoods. But Dorothy’s elementary, junior high, and high schools were segregated even though the family lived in a predominately white neighborhood. This was because around 1956, and after Rosa Park’s bus boycott in Montgomery, AL, her father, like other ministers, became more active in civil rights and one of his actions was to move to a predominately white neighborhood.

Deferred Dreams, Defiant Struggles

Deferred Dreams, Defiant Struggles interrogates Blackness and illustrates how it has been used as a basis to oppress, dismiss and exclude Blacks from societies and institutions in Europe, North America and South America. Employing uncharted analytical categories that tackle intriguing themes about borderless non-racial African ancestry, “traveling” identities and post-blackness, the essays provide new lenses for viewing the “Black” struggle worldwide. This approach directs the contributors’ focus to understudied locations and protagonists. In the volume, Charleston, South Carolina is more prominent than Little Rock Arkansas in the struggle to desegregate schools; Chicago occupies the space usually reserved for Atlanta or other southern city “bulwarks” of the Civil Rights Movement; diverse Africans in France and Afro-descended Chileans illustrate the many facets of negotiating belonging, long articulated by examples from the Greensboro Woolworth counter sit-in or the Montgomery Bus Boycott; unknown men in the British empire, who inverted dying confessions meant to vilify their blackness, demonstrate new dimensions in the story about race and religion, often told by examples of fiery clergy of the Black Church; and the theatres and studios of dramatists and visual artists replace the Mall in Washington DC as the stage for the performance of identities and activism.