Rosa Parks Kept her Seat 60 Years Ago Today

On this day in history – December 01,1955…. black seamstress Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus. Her arrest led to a yearlong boycott of the city buses by blacks and is considered the birth of the civil rights movement.

USA Today writes that “Rosa Parks wasn't the first. Fifteen-year-old civil rights activist Claudette Colvin came before Parks in making news for being dragged off a bus and jailed for not giving up her seat, but she was pregnant at the time and the NAACP didn't think she could get the support of conservatives to spark a movement. That's where Rosa Parks came in.

Parks was a seamstress by trade, but was deeply active in the NAACP and Montgomery Improvement Association, working to improve civil rights in her community. Her Dec. 1 action of refusing to give her seat in the black section of the bus to a white man was calculated, but not planned for that time. "I got on it to go home," Parks has said
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2015/12/01/rosa-parks-bus-facts/76603386/