February 6, 2019
Page 5
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photo by a ssoCiateD
p ress
Rosa Parks being fingerprinted in
February 1956 by Deputy Sheriff
D.H. Lackey after being arrested for
boycotting public transportation in
Montgomery, Ala.
A Heroine for
Transit Rights
C ontinueD from f ront
workshop on Highlander Folk School in
Tennessee where several activist groups
developed skills on leadership and civil
disobedience.
Two other arrests of young black wom-
en activists refusing to move to the back
of the bus occurred that same year, one of
which Parks and another woman, Virginia
Durr, raised money for.
Parks action was the first phase of a
planned boycott of the bus company,
whose ridership was 70 percent black at
the time, a campaigned that would cripple
the bus line and spearheaded by Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr.
The campaign had focused on Parks’
case, but she was as integral to that cam-
paign as she was merely a symbol of it. In-
deed, the fliers announcing the boycott of
the bus line were dropped on the doorsteps
of African American homes in Montgom-
ery the very afternoon of her arrest and the
campaign launched King as a national civil
rights figure.
Even the photos of Parks have been
misconstrued in history. For instance, the
photo of her getting finger-printed, which
is often cited as taking place on Dec 1,
1955, actually occurred months later, when
Montgomery criminalized the carpools
that she participated in, in support of the
bus boycott.
The Montgomery Bus Boycott was ulti-
mately successful and in December 1956,
the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a district
court decision that had declared Montgom-
ery’s system of segregated seating uncon-
stitutional.
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