The Mother of the Freedom Movement: The Montgomery Bus Boycott

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The Mother of the Freedom Movement
In 1955, an African-American seamstress helped cause the civil rights movement in the United States, and her name was Rosa Parks. Rosa Parks was an African-American civil rights activist. Many know her by “the first lady of civil rights” or “the mother of the freedom movement.” Rosa Parks once said, “I’d see the bus pass everyday, but to me, that was a way of life; we had no choice but to accept what was the custom. The bus was among the first ways I realized there was a black world and a white world.” (The Story Behind The Bus) After she said this, she knew she had to take a stand against segregation and do everything in her power to change it.
Rosa Louise McCauley Parks was born on February 4th, 1913 in Tuskegee, Alabama to her parents James McCauley and Leona Edwards. Eventually in 1915, Rosa’s parents divorced and her mother took her and her brother to live in Pine Level. In Pine Level, Rosa lived with her grandparents most of the time. Rosa was homeschooled until she was eleven years old, and she then attended a public school called Industrial School for Girls. She took vocational and academic courses, and she also started laboratory school for a secondary education, but unfortunately she never got to finish because she was forced to drop out to take care of her ill grandmother. Growing up, Rosa was influenced by the Jim Crow Laws, these laws segregated white people from black people in almost everything they did, including public restrooms, drinking fountains, education and transportation. Transportation for the blacks was very different than the whites, the whites were allowed to ride the bus to take them to their schools while the blacks were required to walk to their schools. Public t...

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...t neither of them would take a stand for what they believed in because they thought no one would agree or try to help them change these laws.
The Montgomery Bus Boycott took place from December 5, 1955, to December 20, 1956. This boycott was when African Americans refused to ride any city buses in Montgomery, Alabama, to protest against segregated seating. 40,000 people were already organized in this boycott only two days after Parks’ arrest. Many whites tried to stop the boycott by trying to separate the black community, and they also tried to break down the private taxi system that allowed the blacks to have a source of transportation. More than 66 percent of people that rode these buses were blacks, causing tons of buses to start suffering economically. The Montgomery Boycott changed a lot, but this biggest effect it had was to stop segregation towards blacks.

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