Arrest of Rosa Parks

People

Rosa Parks

Outcome

unknown

On the evening of December 1, 1955, Rosa Louise Parks, a 42-year-old Black seamstress and longtime NAACP secretary, was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger on a segregated city bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Her act of defiance, and the community's organized response, launched the Montgomery Bus Boycott, a 381-day mass protest that ended with the U.S. Supreme Court declaring bus segregation unconstitutional. The boycott propelled a young minister named Martin Luther King Jr. to national prominence and is widely regarded as the spark that ignited the modern civil rights movement. Rosa Parks became known as "the mother of the civil rights movement." Montgomery's city buses operated under a rigid system of racial segregation. The front ten seats were permanently reserved for white passengers. The rear ten seats were designated for Black passengers. The middle sixteen seats operated on a first-come, first-served basis, but with strict rules: white passengers filled these seats from front to back, while Black passengers filled them from back to front. When the white section filled and more white passengers boarded, the bus driver could order Black passengers in the middle section to give up their seats and move farther back, or stand if the bus was full. Black passengers were also required to pay their fare at the front, then exit and re-enter through the rear door. Drivers sometimes pulled away before Black passengers could re-board. The driver of Rosa Parks' bus that evening was James F. Blake, a 43-year-old white man. This was not their first encounter. Twelve years earlier, in November 1943, Parks had boarded a bus driven by Blake and paid her fare. When she attempted to walk through the white section to reach the back, Blake ordered her to exit and re-enter through the rear door. When she complied and stepped off the bus, Blake drove away, leaving her standing in the rain. Parks later recalled: "I made a vow that I would never ride a bus driven by that man again." For twelve years, she kept that vow, letting Blake-driven buses pass and waiting for the next one. On December 1, 1955, she boarded the Cleveland Avenue bus without noticing who was driving. After her shift at Montgomery Fair department store, Rosa Parks boarded the Cleveland Avenue bus at Court Square around 6:00 PM. She paid her 10-cent fare and took a seat in the first row of the middle section, the fifth row from the front, in the window seat on the aisle side, next to a Black man. Two Black women sat across the aisle. As the bus continued along its route, the white section filled. At the third stop, in front of the Empire Theater, several white passengers boarded, and one white man was left standing. Driver James Blake looked back and ordered the four Black passengers in Parks' row to move. He said: "Y'all better make it light on yourselves and let me have those seats." The three other Black passengers reluctantly stood and moved toward the back. Rosa Parks did not. She slid from the aisle seat to the window seat, but she did not stand. Blake approached her and asked if she was going to move. Parks replied: "No." Blake warned her: "Well, I'm going to have you arrested." Parks responded: "You may do that." Blake left the bus and called the police. Officers **F.B. Day** and **D.W. Mixon** arrived and boarded the bus. When Officer Day asked Parks why she would not move, she replied: **"Why do you all push us around?"** Day answered: "I don't know, but the law is the law and you're under arrest." Rosa Parks was arrested and taken to Montgomery City Jail. She was booked, fingerprinted, and briefly incarcerated. At the station, she was denied a drink of water from a "whites only" water fountain. She later described calling her husband from jail: "I said, 'I'm in jail. See if you can get me out.' He said, 'I'll be there in a few minutes.' He didn't have a car, so I knew it would be longer."