Her act of civil disobedience was not pre-meditated.Īlthough Parks knew that the NAACP was looking for a lead plaintiff in a case to test the constitutionality of the Jim Crow law, she did not set out to be arrested on bus 2857. I didn’t want any more run-ins with that mean one.” After the written order from the Supreme Court outlawing bus segregation arrived and the Montgomery Bus Boycott ended on December 21, 1956, one of the newly integrated buses that Parks boarded to pose for press photographs happened to be driven by Blake. “After that, I made a point of looking at who was driving the bus before I got on. “I never wanted to be on that man’s bus again,” she wrote in her autobiography. In 1943, Blake had ejected Parks from his bus after she refused to re-enter the vehicle through the back door after paying her fare at the front. Parks had a prior encounter with James Blake, the bus driver who demanded she vacate her seat. Her political activism continued through the boycott and the rest of her life. At the time of her arrest, she was a secretary of the local NAACP chapter, and the previous summer she had attended a workshop for social and economic justice at Tennessee’s Highlander Folk School. Parks was a long-time member of the Montgomery chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which she joined in 1943. Parks was a civil rights activist before her arrest. Gayle case that resulted in the Supreme Court ruling bus segregation unconstitutional. The four were plaintiffs in the Browder v. (Parks was involved in raising defense funds for Colvin.) Three other African American women-Aurelia Browder, Mary Louise Smith and Susie McDonald-also ran afoul of the bus segregation law prior to Parks. Nine months before Parks was jailed, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin was the first Montgomery bus passenger to be arrested for refusing to give up her seat for a white passenger. Parks was not the first African American woman to be arrested for refusing to yield her seat on a Montgomery bus.

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