Kevin Blowers
Trenkle Period 8
5/28/08
Women’s Rights Paper
How did Rosa Parks have an impact on the Civil Rights Movement? Rosa Parks was a woman that had the courage to stand up to all the white versus black segregation, by refusing to move out of her seat for a white person when asked to. This act of courage influenced African Americans all around to stick up for themselves and to not stand for all the unnecessary segregation going on by the Jim Crow Laws. For her actions, Rosa Parks was remembered as one of the most important Civil Rights Movement activists. Rosa made a big impact for the movement from the actual incident that took place, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and the trial, Browder vs. Gayle.
During the 1950’s there were many laws about segregating blacks and whites, one of them being that the first four rows on the bus were reserved for white people, and black people had to sit in the back. On December 1st, 1955, Rosa was on the bus sitting in the section designated for the black people, and at one stop there was not enough seats for all the white people, so the bus driver ordered Rosa to get up and move for the white man and she refused to do so, and was arrested[1].
Her act of civil disobedience started up the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which was when all the blacks in Montgomery were informed to not ride the bus until they were treated fairly, blacks were hired as bus drivers, and there were no assigned seats for whites and blacks. The boycott lasted 381 days, Dozens of public buses stood idle for months, severely damaging the bus transit company's finances, until the law requiring segregation on public buses was lifted[2]. The boycott has gone down as one of the biggest, most successful movements against racial segregation, and even sparked other boycotts in other towns.
Soon after the boycott started, attorneys Fred Gray, and E.D. Nixon looked for an ideal case to challenge the constitutional legitimacy of bus segregation laws...