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Alabama:
Montgomery Museum Recalls Civil Rights Struggle 

By Shirley Moskow

Rosa Parks is 91-years-old. The “Mother of the Modern Day Civil Rights Movement” was a 42-year-old black seamstress in 1955, when she refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man. A quiet act of courage, her simple gesture of civil disobedience ushered in a social and political revolution.

The historic story is told at the Rosa Parks Library and Museum at Troy State University Montgomery, Alabama. The modern brick and concrete building stands at the corner of 252 Montgomery St., a few steps from where a driver stopped his bus and had Parks arrested.

Inside, visitors may board a yellow bus like the one Parks rode that day. But the journey they take will cover years, not miles. “Back then,” Parks told an interviewer, “we didn’t have any civil rights. It was just a matter of survival… I remember gong to sleep as a girl hearing the Klan ride at night and hearing a lynching and being afraid the house would burn down.”

Parks and her husband Raymond were long-time activists, working quietly with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). She remembers “cases of flogging, peonage, murder, and rape,” but the NAACP was rarely successful.

Buses, like most public places in the south, were segregated by color. It was the law. On December 1, 1955, Parks didn’t board the first bus to come along. It was crowded and she was too weary to stand. She found a seat on the next bus, beside a black man in the first row designated for black people not, as has been reported, in the white section at the front of the bus. At each stop, the bus took on more people. When a white man boarded and there was no seat for him in the white section, the driver asked Parks to move. She quietly refused. The driver threatened to call the police. Still, she sat. He stopped the bus and made a phone call.

Two policemen arrived and escorted Parks from the bus. She was arrested. Four days later, she was found guilty of violating a city ordinance. The original police blotter with the record of her arrest is among several historic documents on view at the library.

To protest the action against Parks, Montgomery’s black population called a one-day boycott of public buses. It brought nation-wide attention so they continued the boycott. As days turned into weeks and weeks into months, the boycott proved surprisingly effective. Black people rarely went downtown to shop. The economic hardship crippled the city,

During the 381 days of the boycott, black people, with the help of their churches, set up an ad-hoc transportation system. A 1955 blue station wagon used to shuttle people to and from work is on exhibition.

A brilliant new leader emerges

Among those organizing the boycott and marshaling support for Parks was a young pastor who became president of The Montgomery Improvement Association. New to his first pulpit at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church – built on land that had been a lynching field – Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. fortified his congregation with resolve and vision.

A museum tableau depicts Dr. King at breakfast, reading a newspaper story about the boycott. My guide said it is such a good likeness that it startled Mrs. King.

A Supreme Court decision struck down the Montgomery ordinance under which Parks had been fined – she says she never paid the fine – and outlawed racial segregation on public transportation. It marked the beginning of the end of the Old South.

Travelers to Montgomery may also visit the Civil Rights Memorial designed by Maya Lin. A few blocks from the White House of the Confederacy, the fountain’s waters wash over the names of people who died for Civil Rights. The wall bears a quotation from Dr. King: “…until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

Shirley Moskow is a frequent contributor to The Cultured Traveler.