Rosa Parks Is Fingerprinted by Police

Photograph

By: Gene Herrick

Date: 1956

Source: AP/Wide World Photos. Reproduced by permission.

About the Photographer: Gene Herrick was a staff photographer for the Associated Press, a worldwide news agency based in New York.

INTRODUCTION

Racial segregation was the rule during the 1950s in the southern states, where the great majority of African Americans lived. In Montgomery, Alabama on December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man. Her action set off a full-scale, nationwide assault on Jim Crow segregation laws.

No segregation law angered African Americans in Montgomery more than bus segregation. There were about 50,000 African Americans in the city, and they made up sixty-six percent of bus riders. More African Americans rode the bus than whites because fewer African Americans could afford a car. An African American entering the bus would step through the first door, pay, exit back out the door, and enter the bus from the second door. On numerous occasions, the white bus drivers would amuse themselves by stepping on the gas as African Americans exited the first door, leaving them to stand on the sidewalk in a cloud of dust. Once through the second door, African Americans were expected to take a seat at the back of the bus, then gradually fill up the seats until meeting the white section. If a white person entered a full bus, an African American was expected to surrender his or her seat since Montgomery had a local ordinance that required them to give up their seat on public transportation to a white when asked.

African Americans were repeatedly told by the bus company, the city council, and local community activists that the rudeness of the bus drivers was a fact of life in Montgomery. Nothing could be done to stop it. Parks, the secretary of the local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), had already inquired about a possible bus boycott and had been told by others in the African American community that they would not participate because the walk to work would be too long. Meanwhile, the Montgomery NAACP had begun to contemplate filing suit against the city over bus segregation but they needed the right plaintiff and a winnable case.

Parks was the right plaintiff. Unlike other women who had been arrested on the buses, she did not have a police record and was not pregnant outside of wedlock. Parks was a quiet, church-going, married woman who had gainful employment as a seamstress in a downtown department store. She got on a bus on December 1, 1955. She did not intend to get arrested and, contrary to popular belief, she was also not physically tired. At the next stop, some whites entered and filled up every seat. One white man remained standing and the bus driver, James Blake, asked Parks to give up her seat. Believing that African American compliance with segregation had only led to worse treatment, Parks was tired of giving in. She refused to move and was arrested.

PRIMARY SOURCE

ROSA PARKS IS FINGERPRINTED BY POLICE

See primary source image.

SIGNIFICANCE

In the early morning hours after Parks' arrest, African American community leaders blanketed sections of Montgomery with leaflets urging support of a one-day bus boycott as a protest. The boycott proved so successful that the leaders decided to continue the protest in an attempt to obtain substantial change. On December 5, leaders of local organizations founded the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) to organize and maintain the boycott. Martin Luther King, Jr. came to national prominence as the spokesperson for the MIA.

For months, African Americans formed carpools, hitchhiked, or simply walked. The boycott was almost completely effective. It put economic pressure not only on the bus company but on many Montgomery merchants because the boycotters found it difficult to get to downtown stores and shopped instead in their own neighborhoods. Still, the white town fathers held out against the boycott. In a case initiated by the MIA, a federal district court overturned the "separate but equal" doctrine established by the Supreme Court in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision. In November 1956, the Supreme Court let the lower court decision stand without review. The next day, King and other African Americans boarded the buses in Montgomery. In an attempt to keep the spirit of the bus boycott alive, King and a group of associates founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957. It would become one of the leading organizations of the nonviolent civil rights movement.

FURTHER RESOURCES

Books

Brinkley, Douglas. Rosa Parks. New York: Viking, 2000.

Kohl, Herbert R. She Would Not Be Moved: How We Tell the Story of Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott. New York: New Press, 2005.

Parks, Rosa and Jim Haskins. Rosa Parks: My Story. New York: Dial Books, 1992.

Williams, Donnie. The Thunder of Angels: The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the People Who Broke the Back of Jim Crow. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2006.