Know Their Names: The Other Black Women Behind the Montgomery Bus Boycott
Remember This: Rosa Parks didn’t boycott alone in 1955.
If the name Rosa Parks rings any bells today, it’s probably as the woman who was “too tired” to give up her seat to a White man in the “White” section of the city bus in Montgomery, Alabama, as mandated by law. She was immediately arrested. Days later, her arrest sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the yearlong-plus protest that desegregated city buses and catapulted Martin Luther King Jr. to national attention, anointing him as the nation’s de facto top Black leader.
Parks was good and tired, but elements of the story are often condensed or mythologized. Let’s recap the rest of the story, shall we? December 1, 1955, was not the beginning of the fight against Jim Crow laws. In 1943, Parks was tired enough to follow her husband, Raymond, and join the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP. She wasn’t just a card-carrying member either; she was secretary to the chapter’s president, E.D. Nixon. In 1944, she led the investigation into the gang rape of Recy Taylor by a group of White men and succeeded in garnering national attention for the injustice. She was also registered to vote, which, as illustrated in Ava DuVernay’s film Selma, was no easy feat back then. In the summer of 1955, months before her action, Parks…
