Seventy years ago today, a quiet Christian woman changed history. Rosa Parks, born in 1913 in the segregated South, was raised by her mother and grandmother. The descendant of slaves, she began working on a plantation in Alabama at the age of six. Raised in the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), Parks grew up memorizing Scripture, singing hymns, and attending church weekly. As an adult, she taught Sunday School every week.
At the turn of the 20th century, as Jim Crow laws were passed in many Southern states, Montgomery, Ala., passed an ordinance that segregated the city buses by race. The first several rows were “white only” and if they filled, black passengers in the middle and back rows were required to give up their seats for white passengers. Parks, like other black riders, had endured this humiliation for many years. In 1943, she had a confrontation with bus driver James Blake and, to make way for a white passenger, was forced to get off a city bus.
Twelve years later, on Dec. 1, 1955, Parks hopped aboard a similar bus, sitting in a middle section, when Blake confronted her and asked her to move. She refused and was arrested. Parks’ refusal sparked a nationwide bus boycott that lasted over a year. Her quiet act of resistance not only sparked this protest—in which 40,000 Montgomery residents refused to ride city buses—but it helped launch the career of civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. In June of 1956, in Browder v. Gayle, the Supreme Court ordered Montgomery to stop enforcing bus segregation, further chipping away at segregation in the states, permitted by the 1896 Supreme Court case, Plessey v. Ferguson.
Rosa Parks’ refusal to go along with the unjust system of racial segregation is an example of Christian courage. Her act, grounded in the Christian doctrine of the image of God, reminded America that it had yet to live up to the promises in the founding charter that “all men are created equal.” But it did not come without great cost. Her family was forced to move out of Alabama for fear of safety. She spent the rest of her days in Detroit, Mich.
Click Here to Read More (Originally Published at World Magazine)
