WASHINGTON: According to legend, on December 1, 1955, a tired black woman in Montgomery, Alabama, sat in the ‘for whites only’ front section of a bus and started the civil rights movement. Rosa Lee Parks, who has died aged 92, never stopped explaining that this was not really what happened. Nonetheless she continued to be presented as a simple soul with tired feet — a condescending misinterpretation of a woman who was an experienced and respected campaigner for civil rights.

When Rosa Parks was born in Tuskegee, the state of Alabama was rigidly segregated. But her mother, a believer in equality and justice, brought her up to defy racism, telling her about her grandfather, Sylvester Edwards who had defied white racism. Determined that her daughter would be well educated, she also sent Rosa to Miss White’s School for Girls. In this era educated black girls could work either as clerks or seamstresses and Rosa Parks became skilled in the latter. Years later she remembered how racism permeated the details of everyday life. Black women would be served last if they tried to buy new shoes; when they tried a hat on in a store the saleswoman would put a bag inside it.

In the early 1940s, Rosa Parks and her husband Raymond, a barber, whom she had married in 1932, became involved in the Montgomery branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) where she set up the youth council. The Montgomery NAACP chapter decided to take up segregation on public transport — continuing a long tradition of African American direct action on buses. Rosa Parks had been ejected from a bus in 1943 when she refused to enter through the back door, and became well known to drivers, who would sometimes refuse to let her on.

In the late 1940s the Alabama State Conference of NAACP branches was formed and Rose Parks became its first secretary. This brought her into contact with longstanding civil rights campaigners.

These included the labour leader A Philip Randolph, who was president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters from 1925 to 1968. In 1941 he had led a march of 50,000 against unfair government and war industry employment practices, which resulted in the Fair Employment Practices Commission. Parks also knew Ella Baker, who had worked with the Young Negroes Cooperative League under the 1930s New Deal and then organized for the NAACP in the south, becoming field secretary in 1940. It was to be Ella Baker who later helped create the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), bringing ideas of non-violent direct action and collective leadership to a new generation.

There was continuity between the NAACP’s work during the 1940s and the civil rights movement locally in Montgomery as well. Rosa Parks had worked closely with the local president of the NAACP in Montgomery, ED Nixon. He had also led the local Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters for 15 years and was president of the Progressive Democrats. The emergent civil rights movement was thus linked to a whole range of progressive labour and social movements, and individuals often took part in several organizations.

In the early 1950s people were coming to Nixon with their complaints and the idea of a boycott was in the air. The first mass bus boycott had occurred in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 1953 and the same tactic was tried in Virginia with some success. In 1954 a group of professional black women in Montgomery, the Women’s Political Council (WPC) led by Jo Ann Robinson, had protested to the mayor about segregation on the buses, telling him that feeling was so strong that 25 local organizations were discussing a boycott.

Then, early in 1955, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin was dragged off a bus and arrested. The NAACP was ready to take up her case. Inspired by the great victory against segregation in education, which had been won in 1954 with the Supreme Court Brown versus Board of Education of Topeka decision, they wanted to challenge the law. However Colvin turned out to be pregnant and they knew this would bring bad publicity.

Rosa Parks, in contrast, was married, respectable, quiet and dignified. She understood local politics and, moreover, had been encouraged by a white civil rights campaigner Virginia Durr, whose husband acted as a lawyer for the NAACP, to attend the Tennessee Highlander Folk school which taught courses on how to resist segregation.

Rosa Parks left Montgomery Fair, the department store where she did repairs on men’s clothing, as usual on December 1. It was true that she was tired after work and pain in her shoulders, back and neck was troubling her. By chance the bus driver happened to be the very man who had forced her off the bus back in 1943. She did not, as myth would have it, sit in the whites-only front part, but sat beside a black man at the back. As more white people got on the driver told her to give up her seat. She refused.

“If you don’t stand up, I’m going to call the police,” he threatened. To which she replied: “You may do that.”

Arrested, found guilty of violating the segregation law and fined, she consulted with her husband and her mother and decided that her arrest would serve as the test case. ED Nixon set about organizing the boycott immediately. Jo Ann Robinson and Mary Fair Burks of the WPC announced her arrest to the students and teachers at Alabama State college, telling them that a boycott was being organized. They began mimeographing leaflets and getting them distributed. Nixon meanwhile contacted church leaders and progressive ministers, including Ralph Abernathy and EN French, who presented demands to the bus company on December 5. A coalition of local groups formed the Montgomery Improvement Association, which coordinated the boycott.

On the evening of December 5 thousands of people gathered at the Holt Street Baptist church where the young preacher Martin Luther King praised Rosa Parks as ‘one of the finest citizens of Montgomery’ and called for action in protest against her arrest. His speech, which was televised, invoked American democracy, with biblical images of a righteous pilgrimage and a commitment to justice and equality for all. “We in Montgomery,” he proclaimed, “are determined to work and fight until justice runs down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

Ninety-eight per cent of Montgomery’s black citizens participated in the boycott which lasted for 381 days. Nearly 100 people were arrested, including Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King. In January and February 1956, the houses of Nixon and King were bombed. The boycott spread to Tallahassee that May. On December 20, the Supreme Court supported the decision of a lower court and federal injunctions were served on the bus company officials to end segregation. Montgomery’s buses were integrated on December 21, 1956.

A great victory had been won. But Rosa Parks was sacked from her tailoring job and, in 1957 left Montgomery, following harassment, for Detroit. She later became a special assistant to Congressman John Conyers until her retirement in 1988.

In 1965 she was on the historic march through Montgomery when Martin Luther King called for a ‘march on poverty’. And, on December 1, 1995, the 40th anniversary of the Montgomery bus boycott was marked by a commemorative ceremony in her honour on the spot where she had been arrested.

She continued to be extremely active, travelling extensively to lecture on the civil rights movement and the social and economic problems that continued to face black Americans. In 1987 she founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development, which aimed to help the young and educate them about civil rights. In October 1995 she addressed the Million Man March in Washington, in 1996 she toured the US and visited South Africa, and in 1999 she was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, America’s highest civilian honour.

Her autobiography, Rosa Parks: My Story, was published in 1992. Interviewed by Brian Lanker in a collection of portraits of black women who changed America, I Dream a World, she said: “My desires were to be free as soon as I learned that there had been slavery of human beings.” She carried these desires for freedom with her throughout her life.

Her husband Raymond died in 1977.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service