Winds of Change Newsletter, December 2005     See sidebar for table of contents

Rosa Parks Lights the Way

by Janet Keating

On Oct. 24, 2005, the world both celebrated the life and mourned the passing of Mrs. Rosa Parks, a truly remarkable woman, whose simple, but preplanned act of civil disobedience sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott. She was a catalyst for change whose legacy and significance to the Civil Rights Movement can never be overstated. Rosa Parks taught us not only about exercising our individual power, but also more importantly about the enormous power of organized people.

In 1943 she and her husband joined the Montgomery branch of the NAACP where she served as its secretary, registered voters, and served its youth. As an active member of Montgomery Voters League, she coached African-Americans to pass tests required before they could register to vote.

Her arrest on December 1, 1955, for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery, Ala., was the answer to prayers for the Women’s Political Council, set up in 1946 in response to the mistreatment of black bus riders. Blacks had been arrested, and even killed, for disobeying bus drivers. They had already begun to build a case around a 15-year-old girl’s arrest for refusing to give up her seat, and Mrs. Parks had been among those raising money for the girl’s defense.

While her refusal to give up her bus seat seemed like an isolated incident (and was an indisputable act of courage), it was in fact preplanned. Mrs. Parks volunteered for the job. Earlier that summer she had attended an interracial leadership conference at the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tenn. (now the Highland Center located in New Market, Tenn.). There, she later said, she “gained strength to persevere in my work for freedom, not just for blacks but for all oppressed people.”

The Highlander Center’s tribute to Rosa Parks states: “Rosa Parks and other participants from Montgomery actually left that workshop saying they weren’t sure that people in their community would stick together to fight segregation. But when she returned to Highlander in March of 1956, one hundred days into what would become a 381 day boycott, 50,000 people in Montgomery were sticking together, walking rather than riding the bus, launching the next phase of the civil rights movement.”

Rosa Parks’ extraordinary legacy reminds us at OVEC that powerful social change happens when ordinary people plan and act together (organize!) and take shared risks – a tried and true roadmap for ending mountain destruction in Appalachia.