December 1, 1955. There was nothing to suggest that in Montgomery (Alabama), the gesture of a seamstress who sewed sheets signified the beginning of the end of racial segregation in the United States. She was a simple woman who had been born on a farm. Although she was raised by her parents, her grandparents, and a brother, she proved that she was a committed individual through her act.
There was no indication that Parks would stand up to anything more than the mandate of one of Jim Crown's laws. These laws affected the African American community and ethnic minorities. People in these collectives had restrictions on sharing public spaces with whites in schools, bathrooms, restaurants, or public transportation. They entered into force in 1876 and continued to be enacted until the mid-1960s.
Therefore, Parks said that on December 1 when she returned from work exhausted and tired of walking, she disobeyed the status quo of the moment. Despite the recriminations of the bus driver, James Blake did not sit in the back, where blacks were supposed to sit under Jim Crown's mandate. Rosa Parks, with her tiredness on her shoulders, decided that she was not able to take another step. She took her place, despite standing against a society in which ethnic minorities were little less than demonized. They were muzzled and subjected to laws as imperative as they are unfair.
What would race through her head, despite being aware of racial segregation, not being able to bear the visceral emotion of not resisting anymore, after a long walk? She wiped out the fear learned from home, written by force of repression in his DNA and in that of his ancestors.
She was in theory a weak link in that gear so cynically created so that she would never raise her head; however, she ended a system that had mistreated, despised, ignored, and alienated his own since 1876.
Rosa Parks was arrested, jailed, tried, and convicted that night for something as absurd as sitting in the front of a bus. She may not have been free to choose, but she did. She chose her seat, her freedom, and, probably without even considering it, even a tiny bit that of everyone who, from that day forward, is freer, thanks to the courage of a woman who sewed sheets.
Martin Luther King would explain Rosa Parks' reaction and the effect that act had on the fight to abolish racial segregation in 'Stride Toward Freedom : The Montgomery Story' (1958). In the book, he argues that Rosa Parks' arrest was the "trigger rather than the reason for the protest."
The reason, as Luther King explains in his book, is “deeply implicit in recounting similar injustices. In fact, no one can understand the action of Mrs. Parks without realizing that there is a moment when enough has to be said, in which the human personality screams: "I can't take it anymore!"
What happened next after the arrest?
December 2, 1951. A near-unknown pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, named Martin Luther King, met with forty-nine other leaders of the African American community to organize a strategy to respond to the arrest. that Rosa Parks had suffered. In that meeting, as in so many others that were held in those years, the breeding ground was forged to end racial segregation in the United States.
The leaders decided to mobilize African American society. They organized a boycott of Montgomery's public transportation. And they did it conscientiously because the boycott of the African-American community lasted more than a year; Specifically, they were 381 days without getting on a bus.
The consequence is that numerous buses stood idle for months until, a year later in 1956, the United States Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation on buses was unconstitutional. And this was only the beginning of the conquest of Civil Rights that the African American community would star in the following decades.
 |
| Picture: CQFavoctas (Pixabay) |