Rosa Parks
(1913-)
A few years after Sojourner Truth delivered that memorable speech; another woman rocked the world, so to speak, when she refused to get up from her seat on the bus. On Thursday evening December 1, 1955, after a long day of work as a seamstress for a Montgomery, Alabama, department store, Rosa Parks boarded a city bus to go home. [14]
At that time, there was a segregation law in place separating the black and white bus riders. When Rosa boarded the bus she sat in a section of the bus where it was regulated as a white section only. When the bus driver noticed this, he yelled at her to move to the rear of the bus, but Rosa quietly refused to move. Rosa was arrested for this offence.[14] The Black community then pulled together to boycott the bus system. Almost a year after the incident, the Supreme Court ruled that segregation was unconstitutional and blacks were allowed to sit anywhere that they wished. Rosa Parks said that:
"Differences of race, nationality or religion should not be used to deny any human being citizenship rights or privileges."[15]