Rosa Parks stayed put, and ...

Press, 3 December 1985, Page 10

Rosa Parks stayed put, and ...

NZPA-AP Montgomery Thirty years after a black seamstress named Rosa Parks was arrested for not giving up her seat on a city bus to a white man, some bus passengers still think about the woman known as the mother of the civil rights movement. “A lot of people don’t think about what life used to be. They don’t know about Rosa Parks and what she did, and that’s a shame,” said Tanzania Johnson, aged 26, an Alabama State University student.

Mrs Parks, aged 72, a Detroit resident for most of the past 27 years, is back in the town of Montgomery this Week for a celebration marking the 30th anniversary of her arrest and the “Montgomery Bus Boycott”. 1 •

The incident catapulted the Rev. Martin Luther King, jun., to national prominence and brought about a Supreme Court ruling outlawing segregation on city buses. Mrs Parks was going home from her job at a downtown department

store on December 1, 1955. The driver on a city bus ordered her and three other blacks to move to the back of the bus, where the negro section was, to make room for.a white man. The other three stood up, but Mrs Parks refused and was arShe was fined $l4 ($24.50) but never paid it.-Her arrest touched off a black boycott of city buses. The 381-day boycott, organised by Dr King, is credited by many historians with launching the modern

civil rights movement.

“At the time I was arrested I bad no idea it would turn into this,” Mrs Pdrks said.

“But I certainly wouldn’t change anything in my fight for freedom.” < ; > ■

Mrs Parks, an aide to a Democrat representative, John Conyers (Michigan) said in Detroit last week that she did not feel like a heroine.

“But I’m happy to know that some changes for the better were made, and I made a contribution,” she said.