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.

As many as 40,000 Blacks rode Montgomery’s buses every day, along with 12,000 Whites. Parks was not the first woman to be arrested in 1955 for refusing to move; she was fifth. The first had been a 15-year old girl named Claudette Colvin, who was arrested nine months earlier. The NAACP came to the teenager’s aid, and their Youth Council adviser, Parks, followed the case.

Rosa Parks

After the bus boycott, Rosa Parks was released with a suspended sentence and a fine. About a year later, segregated buses were declared unconstitutional.

Parks’ 1955 arrest on a Montgomery bus wasn’t her first fight. In 1943, she had been evicted from a bus for refusing to leave by the back door. A quiet, determined woman, she earned her living as a seamstress, and by winter 1955, she was working in a department store as a tailor’s assistant. She also had worked as secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP, and continued to volunteer as the Youth Council adviser. She had attended workshops at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, which was founded during the Depression to train the poor to organize to help each other. She loved being in Highlander’s integrated setting.

Most importantly, Parks was the NAACP’s best investigator of any sexual assaults that Black victims were brave enough to report. For example, in 1944, Parks investigated the notorious gang rape of Recy Taylor, the 24-year old mother of an infant daughter and wife of a sharecropper in rural Abbeville, Alabama, near the Florida border. On Sept. 3, 1944, walking home from church with a friend and her young son, Taylor was kidnapped and gang raped by six white teenagers, all armed with knives and guns. One was a U.S. Army private.

Taylor’s friend immediately reported the gang rape to local police, and Taylor identified the green Chevy in which she had been abducted. Three eye witnesses identified the driver, who named the six other young men. Police made no arrests.

Parks returned to Montgomery and fired up outrage and support for Taylor in the Black community. The case against the six rapists was dismissed twice by two all-male, all-White grand juries. Taylor’s home was firebombed, and she received many death threats.

But with NAACP and Black community support, she and her family never backed down. According to Danielle L. McGuire's 2011 book, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance—a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power, the organizing that Rosa Parks and other Black civil rights activists did around “the Recy Taylor case brought the building blocks of the Montgomery bus boycott together a decade earlier.”

In the 2017 documentary, The Rape of Recy Taylor, we meet relatives of Taylor’s attackers, who maintain their innocence. We also meet Taylor in old age. She died in 2017, aged almost 98, but not before receiving an apology from the Alabama State Legislature and visiting the White House in 2011.

In another 2017 documentary, Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?, filmmaker Travis Wilkerson visits the house where Rosa Parks stayed during her investigation of Taylor’s case. He pays tribute to her courage in traveling to and staying in Abbeville. Investigating his great-grandfather’s 1946 murder of a Black man in his grocery store not far from Abbeville and getting away with it, Wilkerson manages to convey an enormous sense of danger in his film. He is threatened in a Klan neighborhood, where he can’t stop looking up at trees, and his car is followed out of town through empty rural landscapes at sundown.

Susan Neiman is from Atlanta and author of the 2019 book, Learning From The Germans: Confronting Race and the Memory of Evil, which she says is much more popular in the U.S. than in Germany. Neiman wants to abolish “Jim Crow,” the usual name for the era in which Taylor and Parks lived and worked. The term has roots in comedy, and in any case, Neiman says, the time was full of “domestic terrorism and torture.” The case of Recy Taylor brings home that horror.

 Ann Marie Cunningham is a Columbia University Lipman Fellow for 2020 who will be working with the Mississippi Center for investigative Reporting. She is a veteran journalist/producer and author of a best-seller. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Technology Review, The Nation and The New Republic. Contact her at amclissf@gmail.com.