Modern Civil Rights Movement: Rosa Parks

Rosa Parks is often referred to as the Mother of the modern civil rights movement. Historically she has been depicted as a prim, virtuous, diminutive lady who was merely too tired after a long day at work to move from her seat. Had she been Catholic she surely would have been canonized by now; St. Rosa, the patron saint of bus riders. Forty-two years old at the time of the bus boycott, she was described by Martin Luther King Jr, as “. . the victim–emphasis mine–of both the forces of history and the forces of destiny. She had been tracked down by the Zeitgeist–the spirit of the times.”

Rosa Parks, however, was no victim of anything. She and other black women had long complained about the racist treatment they received on the buses in Montgomery, Alabama.
Taylor, Fannie Daniel and West Daniel, the eighteen-year-old son of Fannie Daniel, were walking home from church late at night when they noticed that a car of young white males had passed them several times. The car finally stopped and seven men got out. Claiming that Taylor had assaulted a white man earlier in the day and they were taking her to be identified, they kidnapped her and drove her into the woods where six of the men took turns raping her. After helping her dress and blindfolding her, the men drove Taylor to the highway and dropped her off, cautioning her not to move until they disappeared. When E. D. Nixon, the president of the Montgomery, Alabama chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was contacted several days after the brutal assault, he assigned the case to Rosa Parks. She in turn formed the Committee for Equal Justice, the seeds of which bore the Montgomery Improvement Association and the Montgomery bus boycott more than a decade