ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1995, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, December 2, 1995 TAG: 9512040048
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: MONTGOMERY, ALA.
SOURCE: JESSICA SAUNDERS ASSOCIATED PRESS
SHE IGNORED orders to give up her seat to a white man. She was arrested and a movement was born.
Rosa Parks was back Friday in the city where she made history, celebrating the 40 years since her simple refusal to give up a seat on a bus sparked the modern-day civil rights movement.
It was Dec. 1, 1955, when Parks, tired from a long day of sewing in a store and tired of segregation, sat firmly in her seat and ignored orders to give up her place to a white man.
She was arrested, and a movement was born. Blacks boycotted the segregated buses, eventually winning their case in the U.S. Supreme Court and inspiring a wave of protests that helped bring down segregation laws across the South.
A historic marker now stands on the spot where Parks was arrested, in front of the Empire Theater on Montgomery Street.
On the anniversary of her act of defiance, Parks, 82, visited a race relations seminar at Maxwell Air Force Base, then attended a book-signing and program at Carver High School. A ceremony at the downtown site was scheduled for later in the day.
Earlier this week, a slim, bespectacled woman who gave her name only as Gertha smiled as she recalled the days when she and other blacks took to their feet rather than sit on segregated buses.
Blacks had long accepted separate bus seats ``because that's the way it was,'' she said. ``It wasn't a choice. We had no transportation, so we had no choice.''
``She realized it was wrong. She had that courage,'' said Gertha, 74, who did her insurance sales by foot during the boycott. ``It was wrong, but nobody stood up and said nothing, so I thank God for her today.''
A year after Parks' conviction under a city ordinance, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered integration of all public transportation, the first in a series of landmark civil rights decisions that eventually erased the white-black dividing line in public places. Meanwhile Parks, finding it difficult to get a job in Alabama, moved to Detroit in the late '50s.
LENGTH: Short : 47 linesby CNB