What Did Rosa Parks Do? More Than Sitting Down on a Bus and Being Arrested

On Dec. 1, 1955, a 43-year old bespectacled, decorous-looking, married seamstress wearing a neat suit was arrested on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Rosa Parks had violated racial segregation laws, which then governed all aspects of daily life in the Deep South, by refusing to give up her seat to a White man and move to the back of the bus with other Black riders.

Perspective, Story Behind The StoryKatherine MitchellDecember 7, 2020Black women, black victims, Rosa Parks, Claudette Colvin, NAACP, NAACP youth council, back of bus, bus boycott, sexual assault, Recy Taylor, gang rape, Montgomery bus boycott, Jim Crow