The Rosa Parks Story - Plot

Plot

This is an account of the life of Rosa Parks and her actions in civil rights. After she refused to give up her seat on a racially segregated bus after a long day at work, she was jailed. Her example and treatment prompted a bus boycott as a major civil rights demonstration in Montgomery, Alabama; it lasted 381 days from 1955 to 1956.

The film shows her background and indicates the issues in the segregated society of Alabama and the South. As a child, Rosa was educated in a private school run by the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), where she was encouraged to overcome the limits of segregation. In her late teens, she married barber Raymond Parks, an advocate of equal rights. She joins the local branch of the NAACP, although her husband believes that the organization has been ineffective in its battle against legalized racism. She worked as a seamstress in a department store.

On December 1, 1955, after working all day, Rosa Parks took a seat in the designated "colored" section of a Montgomery city bus. When the "white" section at the front fills up, the white driver orders Parks to relinquish her seat, as was the practice. She refused, and was arrested and jailed. Civil rights activists organized a one-day bus boycott the day of her trial (she was fined.) With its success, they founded the Montgomery Improvement Association, and began a citywide bus boycott, led by a new local minister, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.. The boycott lasted 381 days, and African Americans made it work, many making sacrifices of time and energy to walk to work and other destinations. As they comprised the majority of bus passengers, the boycott really hurt the business. Eventually a ruling by the United States Supreme Court in the case declared bus segregation unconstitutional. The boycott was important for mobilizing people in the civil rights movement both in the South and nationally.