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With all respect and well-deserved adoration for Rosa Parks, she wasn’t the first. More than eight months before Rosa, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin refused to give up her seat to a white person on a bus in Montgomery Alabama, but then Claudette got pregnant and civil rights leaders who planned to thrust her into the limelight worried over the optics of doing so with an unwed teen mother. Because 1950s America.
--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: December 1, 1955--
While Claudette deserves many accolades, there is a potential silver lining that may have reassured her. In March of 1955, when Claudette was arrested for refusing to relinquish her seat, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a relatively unknown Montgomery preacher. But in the ensuing months his star rose significantly, allowing him to take charge of presenting Rosa Parks to the world as an icon of civil rights for Black people and launch his own world-changing career at the same time.
Black women have always shouldered the brunt of the labor in advancing civil rights, stepping into harm’s way no matter the cost. On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks decided it was her time. She was seated at the front of the “Colored Section” of the bus. But when more whites got on the bus than were seats available in the “White Section,” the bus driver moved the sign for the Colored Section further back and told her and three other Black people to move to the re-designated Colored Section. The others complied, Rosa did not.
Years later Rosa said in an interview, “When that white driver stepped back toward us, when he waved his hand and ordered us up and out of our seats, I felt a determination cover my body like a quilt on a winter night.”
Rosa was arrested, and the 42-year-old woman, who had already been active in the civil rights movement over a dozen years, became a leader of the Montgomery bus boycott, earning such honorifics as “the first lady of civil rights” and “the mother of the freedom movement.” Despite much adversity and threats of death, Rosa Parks remained active in the civil rights movement for the rest of her life. She died in 2005 at the age of 92. Her casket lay in state at the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol, the first woman to receive such honors, where it was viewed by over 50,000 people.
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