February 23, 1995
At age 82, Rosa Parks still draws a crowd.
People began lining up as early as 11 a.m. outside SF State's gymnasium just to catch a glimpse of the woman who some call "the mother of the civil rights movement."
Her appearance at SF State Wednesday marked the 40th anniversary of the Montgomery bus boycott.
Parks was a 42-year-old seamstress earning $25 a week at the Montgomery Fair Department Store in 1955 when her single act of courage sparked the beginning of the civil rights movement.
On the evening of Dec. 1 she boarded the Cleveland Avenue bus, paid her 10 cent fare and took a seat in the first row of the black section of the bus. Several stops later, when the seats had filled in the front of the bus, the bus driver, J.P. Blake, told black passengers to get out of their seats so a white man could sit down. Three blacks got up. Parks refused and was jailed.
"I wanted to let them know that I as a passenger and we as a people had endured that kind of treatment far too long," Parks said in an interview Tuesday.
Emma Borens, an Oakland resident who came to see Parks speak, was a junior high school student in Shreveport, La. in 1955. "I was part of a generation that experienced segregated facilities. I had to ride in the back of the bus when I was a young girl. When she refused (to stand up), it struck a chord."
Contrary to the impression that her feet were tired, Parks said she refused to move because she was tired of being pushed around, tired of the Jim Crow laws and tired of being oppressed.
In her new book, "Quiet Strength," she said, "I felt the Lord would give me the strength to endure whatever I had to face. God did away with all my fear. It was time for someone to stand up -- or in my case, sit down. I refused to move."
After her arrest, the black community organized and successfully boycotted the bus line for 381 days. This protest introduced to the national black community a 26-year-old black minister with a vibrant speaking voice named Martin Luther King Jr. King and other community leaders arranged for black-owned taxi companies to carry passengers for the same price as the bus. When the city said the cabs must charge a minimum 45 cents, more than 150 people volunteered their private cars. Using a sophisticated system of dispatchers and drivers, about 30,000 people were transported to and from work everyday. Countless others walked.
A year later the U.S. Supreme Court declared bus segregation unconstitutional.
Parks was born in Tuskegee, Ala. in 1913. She married Raymond Parks in 1932. Raymond was an early activist in the effort to free the Scottsboro Boys, a highly publicized case in the 1930s.
The Scottsboro Boys were a group of nine young black men who were unjustly accused of raping two white women. All but one were sentenced to die in the electric chair. Due to publicity and public outrage four of the men were released and four more paroled in the 1940s. The ninth man died before being released.
Both Rosa and Raymond were active in the Montgomery branch of the NAACP at the time of her arrest, where she worked as a secretary and was advisor to the youth council. Two years after the Montgomery boycott, they moved to Detroit, Mich., and continued to be active in the civil rights movement. In 1963 they joined the march on the nation's capital and in 1965 they attended the civil rights march from Selma, Ala. to Montgomery. Parks began working as a special aide in 1965 to U.S. Rep. John Conyers in Detroit. She retired in 1988 and still lives in Detroit.
In 1987, at age 75, she co-founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development to educate Detroit youth in honor of her husband Raymond, who died in 1979. The institute strives to educate black youth about their history and give them hope for the future.
On Tuesday Parks stressed the importance for young people to stay in school, stay away from drugs, be aware of their heritage and continue the work that the civil rights movement began.
"We have worked very hard for freedom," Parks said. "We have not reached every goal that we wanted to."
Parks made headlines last September when an intruder broke into her home in Detroit and then beat and robbed her. "I had never been hit in that manner in my life," Parks said about the attack in her book. "I screamed, but no one heard me. I gave him all that I had ($103), and then he left. He could have hurt me much worse, but God protected me.
"I pray for this young man and the conditions in our country that have made him this way... Young people need to be taught to respect and care for their elders. Despite the violence and crime in our society, we should not let fear overwhelm us."
Despite the attack, Parks remains positive.
"We have many opportunities that we didn't have in the past," Parks said. "We need to continue to work, especially with young people."
Parks said young people need to "not only dream, but to act on their dreams."