Rosa Louise Parks: The Modern-Day Civil Rights Movement

“Rosa Louise Parks is nationally recognized as the mother of the modern-day civil rights movement in America” (Reed, 1994). In December 1955, Parks was arrested because she refused to give her seat to a white male passenger on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus. Parks was involved in decades of political work before the boycott due to her activist husband and her family influence. Throughout her life, she was mistreated several times because of her color. In 1943, she was told she did not pass the literacy test, which was a Jim Crow invention to keep blacks from voting; even though in 1945, she passed the test and became one of the few blacks able to exercise the "right" to vote (Dreier, 2006).The dissident action of Parks was courageous and her performance

The story of Rosa Parks is remarkable for her ‘individualistic spin’. Parks is someone whose dissent against racism was spontaneous and unconsidered. If we examine her Park’s act, it implies that “however, what emerges under the lens of this conception of dissident citizenship is a Rosa Parks who was active in a web of dissident counter publics both before and after her arrest”(Sparks,2009). Park’s civil rights movement appears as a principled dissenting action rather than spontaneous. Rosa Parks claims in her biography that her refusal to give up her seat on the bus was unplanned, but I think she was clearly conscious and expressing her bitterness against the racial segregation. As a selfless activist, she had to risks her job and her reputation. Indeed the success of dissident practices of Parks is visible day-to-day everywhere. The success of any movement for social change depends on the good leaders who make important choices about strategy, tactics, knowing when to protest, and compromise. In my opinion, the modern struggles for justice such as battles to sustain gay rights and women's equality and other civil rights movement seem modest by comparison to the movements in history. Today many will label the dissent ideas of Parks as outrageous, utopian, and impractical. But they disregard how the dissenter like Rosa Parks fought for others rights selflessly. Although the Montgomery boycott was a spontaneous outburst of protest, but, due to the powerful outcome of that civil rights movement now everyone has the right to sit anywhere they want and not be segregated by their