Civil rights and legal context

Parks was not the first African American to refuse to give up her seat to a white person. The NAACP accepted and litigated other cases before, such as that of Irene Morgan, ten years earlier, which resulted in a victory in the Supreme Court on Commerce Clause grounds. That victory only overturned state segregation laws as applied to actual travel in interstate commerce, such as interstate bus travel. Black leaders had begun to build a case around a 15-year-old girl’s arrest for refusing to relinquish her bus seat, and Mrs Parks had been among those who were raising money for the girl’s defense. However, when they learned that the girl was pregnant, they decided that she was an unsuitable symbol for their cause.

In 1944 Jackie Robinson took a similar, but lesser-known, stand with an Army officer in Fort Hood, Texas, refusing to move to the back of a bus. He was brought before a court martial, which acquitted him.[1] The NAACP had additionally considered but rejected some earlier protesters deemed unable or unsuitable to withstand the pressure of a legal challenge to segregation laws (see Claudette Colvin and Mary Louise Smith).

The bus and protests

Deputy Sheriff D.H. Lackey of Montgomery fingerprints Parks on 22 February 1956 after the bus boycott prompted a mass arrest of activists
See also: Montgomery Bus Boycott
Parks boarded the Cleveland Avenue bus on December 1, 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama after a day at work. She was sitting in the ‘colored’ section of the bus. The ‘colored’ section of the buses in Montgomery was not fixed in size, but determined by the placement of a movable sign. The driver could move the sign, or even remove it altogether. Mrs Parks initially sat behind the sign, but refused to move when the driver, James Blake, moved it behind her. Blake demanded that four blacks give up their seats in the middle section so a lone white man could sit. Three of them complied. When recalling the incident for Eyes on the Prize, a 1987 public television series on the civil rights movement, Parks said, ” When he saw me still sitting, he asked if I was going to stand up and I said, ‘No, I’m not’. And he said, ‘Well, if you don’t stand up, I’m going to have to call the police and have you arrested.’ I said, ‘You may do that.’ ”