Rosa Parks

Abstract

Rosa Parks is famous as the middle-aged African American seamstress who refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man and was arrested for disobeying local segregation laws. But she was also a longtime civil rights activist — secretary of the Montgomery, Alabama, chapter of the NAACP and a participant in workshops at the Highlander Folk School. Since the 1930s, Highlander, located in the Tennessee mountains, had been an outpost of the Old Left in the South, a place where blacks and whites, Christians and Communists, studied methods of nonviolent protest known collectively as passive resistance. Parks’s arrest on December 1, 1955, sparked a long-planned bus boycott by the African Americans of Montgomery. In March 1956, in the midst of the boycott, Parks returned to Highlander. Her talk highlighted the importance of using disciplined nonviolence to attract media attention and thus arouse the consciences of people around the world. The strategies pioneered by the civil rights movement in the Deep South were subsequently used by all the movements of the New Left.