CU Boulder historian Ashleigh Lawrence-Sanders delineates misperceptions surrounding ‘the mother of the Civil Rights Movement’ and the Montgomery Bus Boycott while highlighting Parks’ enduring legacy

When people hear the name Rosa Parks, they likely picture a quiet, tired, older African American seamstress who refused to give up her seat to a white patron on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus on Dec. 1, 1955.

Ashleigh Lawrence-Sanders

But as University of Colorado Boulder historian Ashleigh Lawrence-Sanders explains, 70 years after Parks’ act of civil disobedience—and the Civil Rights Movement it helped ignite—there is a lot Americans tend to get wrong about that defining moment, which she says is far more complex, courageous and enduring.

“Many people still think of her as a tired seamstress and an old lady, but she was just 42 years old, she was the secretary of the local NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) chapter and she had been politically active in campaigns previously,” says Lawrence-Sanders, a History Department assistant professor who specializes in African American history, including the Civil Rights Movement.

Notably, Parks was not the first Black person to be arrested for violating Montgomery’s segregated bus seating rules, Lawrence-Sanders says. She explains that civil rights activists had been looking for a test case to initiate a city-wide boycott to push for integration of the bus system and Parks was deemed a promising candidate.

“In class, I tell my students why Rosa Parks was chosen—because she was considered a respectable older woman who was married. Also, although she grew up in a working-class family and worked as a seamstress, she had completed high school, which was a rare achievement for Black Southerners then,” Lawrence-Sanders says. “There were teenage girls like Claudette Colvin who had been arrested before but weren’t chosen because, unfortunately, movement leaders did not view them as the right public face for a court challenge.”

Arrest prompts the Montgomery Bus Boycott 

Rosa Parks was arrested on Dec. 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama.

Days after Parks’ arrest, Black leaders in Montgomery organized a city bus boycott. On Dec. 5, 1955, about 40,000 Black bus riders—representing the majority of the city’s bus commuters—boycotted the city transit system.

Seven decades after the bus boycott, Lawrence-Sanders says many people don’t fully appreciate the herculean task of organizing the endeavor, the sacrifices it required and its duration. She says that when she asks her history students to guess how long the bus boycott lasted, they typically say about a few weeks or a month. In truth, it lasted 381 days.

There also tends to be a misperception that the bus boycott was a spur-of-the-moment act—but that was not the case, Lawrence-Sanders says.

Black leaders working for civil rights in Montgomery had been waiting for an opportunity to challenge the city’s segregated bus system—and after Parks’ arrest, they leapt into action with astonishing speed—all without email, social media or other modern technologies. Flyers were printed and distributed by hand by the Montgomery Women’s Political Council, and churches became organizing hubs.

“The Montgomery boycott was planned—not spontaneous,” Lawrence-Sanders says. “Activists were organized and strategic.”

Organizers established vast carpool systems that operated as shadow transit networks, but many Black men and women trudged on foot for miles to and from work every day rather than use the city’s segregated bus system, Lawrence-Sanders says. In some cases, wealthy white women offered rides to their Black domestic workers, which sparked some controversy within Montgomery’s white community, she notes.

And while leaders were chosen for the movement, including a young Martin Luther King Jr., decisions were democratic: at mass meetings, ordinary citizens voted to continue the boycott despite the challenges, Lawrence-Sanders says.

“There are obviously people who are considered leaders of the movement, but ordinary people in the community are making these sacrifices to try to overturn a really unjust system,” she adds.

Montgomery amid the broader struggle for civil rights 

Lawrence-Sanders says it’s important to understand the Montgomery bus boycott in the scope of the larger Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s.

“At the time, we’re just about one year in time removed from the Brown vs. The Board case, which sets off initial school desegregation battles. In my African American history course, I try to make clear (the idea) that ‘The Supreme Court decides it, but it is not decided,’” she says. “There is not a single moment where all of the schools in the South have abandoned segregation; there are multiple local battles for the next two decades or so.”

“We know from images at the time how violent some of those battles became in Little Rock, Arkansas, and in Mississippi and other places.

And then, just months before the Montgomery Bus Boycott began, Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Black boy from Chicago was abducted and lynched after allegedly flirting with a young white woman while visiting family in rural Mississippi, in violation of Southern societal norms at the time.

The brutality of Till’s slaying and the acquittal of the men charged with his murder drew international attention to the long history of lynching in the South in particular, Lawrence-Sanders says. What’s more, Till’s murder laid bare the limitations of U.S. democracy at a time when the United States was engaged in a Cold War with the Soviet Union, where America was portraying itself as the home of liberty and justice, she adds.

“I think the Cold War context is really important, as international media actually picks up what is happening in the United States surrounding the lynchings and murder of Black people and Black children,” Lawrence-Sanders says. “Emmett’s mother’s decision to have an open casket to show what happened to him is a turning point, I think, for some people who may have been unaware of the brutality of the violence of the Jim Crow South.

“The fact that the men that are charged with his murder are acquitted was not a surprise to most people who were familiar with the Jim Crow legal system, but it may have been shocking to those people seeing it for the first time.”

It was against that backdrop that civil rights activists pushed for desegregated busing in Montgomery, often facing intimidation, violence and arrests, Lawrence-Sanders notes. It bears mentioning 70 years later that there was no guarantee their efforts would ultimately prove successful, she adds.

Victory in Montgomery comes at a cost 

Handwritten reflections from Rosa Parks on her arrest. 
Click to see full document.

On June 5, 1956, a Montgomery federal court ruled that any law requiring racially segregated seating on buses violated the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which guarantees all citizens—regardless of race—equal rights under state and federal laws. The city appealed that ruling, but on Dec. 20, 1956, the Supreme Court upheld the lower court’s ruling.

Montgomery’s buses were officially integrated the next day.

Lawrence-Sanders says the success of the Montgomery boycott is now seen as one of the first successful mass protests on behalf of civil rights in the United States, setting the stage for successive actions to bring about legal protections for African Americans. It also resulted in Martin Luther King Jr. becoming a national civil rights leader and solidifying his commitment to nonviolent resistance, she notes.

At the same time, Lawrence-Sanders says it’s important to recognize that there was a cost to be paid for the people who participated in the Civil Rights Movement.

“Activism was never glamorous, protests like sit-ins were disruptive and unpopular at the time,” she says. “Activists faced danger and hostility. We praise them now, but they weren’t celebrated then. We fail to recognize that many people involved in the Civil Rights Movement either died young or struggled for the rest of their lives.”

A number of civil rights leaders had their homes bombed or were killed for their activism, including King. As for Parks, she and her husband moved to Detroit in 1957 after they both lost their jobs and she received death threats.

“She never stops being an activist, though,” Lawrence-Sanders says. “She was involved in the Black Power movement in Detroit, in the anti-apartheid movement and pan-African causes well into the 1980s and 1990s. Like a lot of activists then and now, Rosa Parks protested segregation, sexual violence, unjust imprisonment and apartheid; she understood that solving one issue didn’t end the struggle.”

Parks was later recognized for her efforts, receiving the Congressional Gold Medal in 1992—the highest honor the nation bestows on citizens. At the same time, Lawrence-Sanders says that Parks spent her last years in near poverty, living in a modest Detroit apartment and at one point facing eviction before a rich benefactor came to her aid.

An enduring legacy for civil rights

Lawrence-Sanders says that when she teaches students about the Civil Rights Movement, she instructs them to avoid the trap of seeing those leaders one-dimensionally, in that one moment of their lives.

“History tends to freeze these activists in these celebrated moments, like Rosa Parks in 1955—but she lived for 50 more years and never stopped being an activist,” Lawrence-Sanders says. “The most important part of Rosa Parks’ legacy is her long life of activism—not just the one act we all know about. She made a decision that ignited one of the most important acts of civil disobedience in U.S. history—and then she kept fighting for justice for five decades more.”