Last Year's Lesson: Rosa Parks Refused to Give Up Her Seat - Dec. 1, 1955

Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus on this day in 1955.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, history fans, here's a rerun for today, brought to
you by Tracy V. Wilson. We hope it makes previous
episodes for this date easier to find in the feed.
Welcome to this Day in History Class from how Stuff
Works dot com and from the desk of Stuff you
Missed in History Class. It's the show where we explore
the past one day at a time with a quick

(00:20):
look at what happened today in history. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson, and it's December one.
Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a
white passenger on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama, on
this day in nineteen fifty. There are a lot of

(00:40):
misconceptions about this. What is that Rosa Park was just
really tired from a long day of work and she
just wanted to get home, and this was sort of
something that caught her up in the civil rights movement.
But Rosa Parks had been an activist for many years
before that day on the bus. She had joined the
Double A CPE. She went to leadership conferences and annual meetings,

(01:02):
she chaired committees, She gave addresses at these meetings and conferences.
She documented crimes and discrimination against Black Americans, and she
investigated the sexual assaults and rapes of black women. Another
big misconception is that she was the first person to
refuse to give up her seat to a white passenger
on a segregated bus in Montgomery, and that's not true either.

(01:26):
A lot of people had done the same in the
years leading up to this, including a young woman named
Claudette Colvin. This wasn't even the first time that Rosa
Parks had refused to give up her seat. She had
been removed by the same driver who was at the
wheel that day in ninety five. He had removed her
from a bus previously. She had said she was never
going to ride one of his buses again, and that

(01:48):
she would not have gotten on the bus that day
if she had realized that he was the one at
the wheel when this happened. Though, the n double a
c p. Had been on the lookout for a test
case that they could take to the courts to try
to overturn segregation laws. To do that, they needed a
good plaintiff, somebody who would seem respectable and sympathetic to

(02:10):
a white judge and the white media, and that's how
Rosa Parks became sort of the face of this in
a lot of ways. She's the person most famously associated
with the bus boycott. She was certainly fierce, but she
also had a soft spoken demeanor. She was married, she
had a job, she went to church, She had no

(02:32):
criminal record. This was all part of a legal strategy
to try to do everything possible to take a winnable
case to the courts. The Montgomery bus boycott began as
parks case went to trial. About nine of black riders
boycotted the bus, and the boycott's leaders went to the

(02:52):
city with very clear demands. They wanted courteous treatment on
all the buses. They wanted first come, first served, seating
whites in the front and blacks in the back, so
no more giving up your seat to white passengers. They
also wanted black drivers to be hired for the primarily
black bus routes. This boycott went on for more than

(03:12):
a year, during which time Parks and other leaders of
it did extensive organizing and campaigning, and this was all
at great risk to their own lives. The houses of
multiple people who were involved in the boycott were bombed,
including the house of Martin Luther King Jr. Ultimately, the
case went all the way to the United States Supreme Court,
which ultimately issued a written order that the buses be integrated.

(03:36):
This was one of the major moments in the civil
rights movement in the United States. Rosa Parks that her husband,
though faced extensive harassment and discrimination and threats all during
and after the boycott. They later moved away to Detroit
with the hope of starting over without all of this harassment.
But even in Detroit they had trouble getting work because

(03:58):
of their association with the boycott in the civil rights movement.
It took Rosa Parks about five years to find steady
paying work. Afterward, she eventually got a job in the
office of Representative John Conyers Jr. And she continued working
there until she retired. She died on October two thousand five.
You can learn more about her and about the bus

(04:19):
boycott in the February three episodes of Stuffymiss in History Class.
Thanks to Ksey P. Grimm and Chandler Maze for their
audio work on this show. You can subscribe to the
Stay in History Class on Apple Podcasts, Google podcast, the
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Tune in tomorrow for an influential doctrine