Rosa Parks was born in Tuskegee on February 4, 1913. His activism began with joining the American Civil Rights Movement in 1943, the same year he was appointed secretary of the NAACP: National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, also supported by a young Martin Luther King. In 1955, he began attending the Highlander Folk School, a center for information on workers’ rights and the problem of oppression suffered by blacks. At this time the law provided for segregation of blacks in public places.
It’s December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Rosa Parks, who works as a seamstress is returning home after a tiring day’s work. It is located on bus 2857, on which there is space in the central seats, dedicated to both white and black, with the obligation to leave the place if a white man is present. And that’s exactly what happens: a white passenger gets on the bus and the driver asks Rosa to get up, but this time something different happens. Rosa Parks speaks one word calmly: no. She’s not getting out of that place, and that’s why she’s being tried for misconduct. She described the motivation, the tiredness that led her to that gesture: “They always say that I didn’t give up because I was tired, but that’s not true. I was not physically tired, no more than I usually was at the end of a day’s work. No, the only thing I was tired of was suffering”. The situation in which black people are forced to live is exhausting and the gesture of Rosa Parks is the gesture of a woman exasperated by being considered a second-rate human being.
No: a simple word, consisting of two letters. But what is capable of triggering this simple word? On December 5, 1955, black boycotts began. Black taxi drivers reduce prices to those of tickets and buses are now taken only by white people, but the strike lasted until December 26, 1956, the boycott of buses made history. The United States Supreme Court ruled on December 13 that year that black segregation was unconstitutional.
The protest despite everything was peaceful, the blacks in America in those years (to tell the truth even today) could have brought out all the anger and violence that they held because of inhuman treatment, but they decided to act peacefully, in contrast to the American law enforcement agencies that still attack African Americans when they cannot defend themselves, killing many innocent people.
Valeria Del Sordo 4N
