Existing comment:
Rosa Parks, 1913-2005
The modern civil rights movement in the United States began on a public bus in Montgomery, Alabama, on December 1, 1955. African Americans seamstress Rosa Parks refused the driver's request to give up her seat in the first row of the "colored" section to a white passenger. "I knew someone had to take the first step and I made up my mind not to move." Sculptor Marshall D. Rumbaugh depicts Parks as she is being escorted to jail by the arrested officers. In protest against the unconstitutionality of Alabama's laws requiring segregated seating on public conveyances, the Montgomery black community, led by twenty-seven-year-old clergyman Martin Luther King Jr., organized a bus boycott that kept some 17,000 African Americans off the buses. The boycott lasted 382 days, until December 13, 1956, when the US Supreme Court ruled such segregation laws as unconstitutional.
Marshall D. Rumbaugh, 1983 |