Remembering the day Parks changed the world

At the Glen Cove Pre-Council meeting on Dec. 1, the City Council reflected on the day in 1955 that Rosa Parks started a movement by saying “no” to racist policies.

“Sixty-five years ago today, on Dec. 1, 1955, a woman was arrested for failing to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama,” City of Glen Cove Mayor Tim Tenke said. “That was Rosa Parks. Although we celebrate her day, which is always Feb. 4 of each year, it’s significant today that it’s been 65 years since that’s happened.”

Parks, instead of going to the back of the bus, which was designated for African Americans, she sat in the front. When the bus started to fill up with white passengers, the bus driver asked Parks to move. She refused. Her resistance set in motion one of the largest social movements in history, the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

“At just 5-foot-3, Rosa Parks may have been small in stature, but she continues to be a giant among our civil rights icons,” said City of Glen Cove Councilman Gaitley Stevenson-Mathews. “Her simple act of defiance is a lasting reminder that one person’s actions can change the course of history.”

By the time Parks boarded the bus in 1955, she was an established organizer and leader in the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama. Parks not only showed active resistance by refusing to move, she also helped organize and plan the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

“People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true,” Parks had said. “I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was 42. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”

Parks courageous act and the subsequent Montgomery Bus Boycott led to the integration of public transportation in Montgomery. Her actions were not without consequence, however. She was jailed for refusing to give up her seat and lost her job for participating in the boycott.

After the boycott, Parks and her husband Raymond Parks moved to Hampton, Virginia and later permanently settled in Detroit, Michigan.

Parks’s work proved to be invaluable in Detroit’s Civil Rights Movement. She was an active member of several organizations, which worked to end inequality in the city.

By 1980, after consistently giving to the movement both financially and physically Parks, then widowed, suffered from financial and health troubles. After almost being evicted from her home, local community members and churches came together to support Parks.

On Oct. 24, 2005, at the age of 92, she died of natural causes leaving behind a rich legacy of resistance against racial discrimination and injustice.