It was seventy years ago today that civil rights icon Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to surrender her seat on a Montgomery City bus to a white male passenger. The incident helped spark the Montgomery bus boycott a few days later. That 381-day long action would help propel Parks and Doctor Martin Luther King, Junior into the international spotlight.
Tuskegee attorney Fred Gray, who represented both Parks and MLK, spoke at length with APR news in 2018 on what went on “behind the scenes” at that time. That included advice Gray gave Parks in the days leading up to her act of defiance on a Montgomery bus. Gray told APR the subject came up on what someone should do if asked to give up their seat on a bus.
“If the opportunity presented itself and they decided that they didn't want to get up and give their seat, and I knew that Mrs. Parks, if the opportunity presented itself, she probably would not get up, because she was well prepared for it,” he recalled to APR news in 2018.
APR Gulf coast correspondent Cori Yonge reports later this week on Rosa Park’s contributions to the cause of civil rights, beyond her arrest on this date back in 1955. This story is part of a yearlong APR news investigation into three key events being observed in 2025, the sixtieth anniversary of the shooting death of activist Jimmie Lee Jackson and the attack on voting rights marchers on Selma’s Edmund Pettus bridge. This year is also seventy years since the Montgomery Bus boycott, sparked by Parks.
The APR news team will premiere a special report next week, titled “…a death, a bridge, and a seat on the bus.” The program will air Friday, December 12th, at 7 pm.
A one-day bus boycott was called immediately after Park’s arrest in 1955. The 381-day follow-up action was voted into being on December 5th, 1955. Fred Gray was out of town on business when Parks was arrested. He recalled to APR in 2018, who happened after Park’s was taken into custody and fingerprinted, which sparked the boycott.
“When I got back, I had a call from Mrs. Parks, and she asked me, to come to her house. She told me she had been arrested, and she wanted me to represent her. So, I went to her house after her arrest on December 1, and she told me what had taken place,” he said in 2018.
Back in October, statues of Parks and of Helen Keller, pivotal figures who fought for justice and inspired change across the world, were unveiled on the grounds of the Alabama Capitol. The monuments honoring the Alabama natives whose advocacy helped dismantle racial segregation and promoted the rights of people with disabilities are the first statues of women to be installed on the lawn of the Alabama Capitol, broadening the history reflected on the grounds that also include tributes to the Confederacy, which was formed at the site in 1861.
Governor Kay Ivey, currently the nation’s longest serving female governor, said Parks and Keller “rose to shape history through quiet strength and unwavering conviction.”
“Courage changes the course of history, and today, these statutes stand as symbols of that courage — testaments to what one person, especially one determined one, can do to make the world a better place,” Ivey said.
While Rosa Parks was not the first woman arrested for defying bus segregation laws, her arrest became the catalyst for the yearlong boycott by Black passengers and helped usher in change nationwide. She is now considered the “mother of the U.S. civil rights movement.”
The statue of Parks, themed as “a step into equality,” shows her as if boarding a bus, just across the Capitol steps from a statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, a fitting location for an icon who showed “how to fight against racial segregation and inequality in a non violent way,” the Rev. Agnes M. Lover said.
Parks appears to peer down Dexter Avenue. That’s the street where she boarded the bus that history-making day, and also the site of slave markets in the 1800s as well as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Dexter Avenue Church, where mass meetings were held to organize the bus boycott.
