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Remembering Rosa Parks A courageous stand for civil rights was celebrated yesterday, Dec. 1, as Albion College and community members remembered activist Rosa Parks on the 50th anniversary of her aborted bus ride in Montgomery. Braving temperatures well below freezing, more than two dozen people turned out for the vigil on the campus Quadrangle. On December 1, 1955, Parks was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, for refusing to give her seat to a white rider on a public transit bus. This event triggered the Montgomery bus boycott, arguably the landmark civil rights protest of the 20th century. Albion College history professor Wes Dick noted that at the time of her fateful bus ride, Parks was a member of the NAACP and a civil rights activist from the early 1940s. Contrary to the popular idea that Parks capriciously resisted getting up, "Rosa had prepared a long time for this moment. It was not simply a spontaneous impulse," said Dick. "It was an incredibly courageous act. Black or white people who challenged segregation risked harm or even a violent death, and Parks was well aware of this fact." "She was part of a political activist network resisting segregation," Dick continues. "Her courage and political activism galvanized Montgomery blacks, including Martin Luther King." Parks's arrest led to the 13-month-long Montgomery Bus Boycott, which ended in a victory for desegregation. "It was a victory for individual courage, for non-violence, and for political and social action," Dick concluded. William Murphy, pastor of Albion's East Chestnut Street Church of Christ, recalled traveling to Detroit last month to view Parks' body before her funeral. "There were 40,000 people who went to see her, plus 4,000 who stood in line and didn't get in," he recalled. "What she did her whole life touched so many people. She was a hero."
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Albion College ◦ Albion, Michigan
◦ 517/629-1000
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