The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks 4

The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks
Jeanne Theoharis
56 of 221 pages
Biography

Quote from the book: “Each person must live their life as a model for others.” This is something Rosa Parks said, and it was also like one of her life mottos. It is very true, and you see this everywhere: children learn a lot from their parents (also from other family members, and even friends) and may even develop into a similar person, or at least have similar traits. That’s why it is very important to be a good role model for younger ones, but just to be a good model in general.

Scottsboro Boys

What happened until now: This week, I found out a lot about what Rosa contributed and did before the bus boycott. She often risked her life for others before December 1955 already, and was very involved in the case of the Scottsboro boys as a militant activist. On March 25^th, 1933, a fight broke out on a Southern Railroad freight train between white and black men. The nine young black men were arrested because of the false accusation of raping two women who were also on the train. Rosa watched as all nine men, one of them of the young age of 13, got convicted and sentenced to death. This made the decision easy: Rosa and her husband joined other black activists to raise money for the Scottsboro boys during secret meetings. In 1944, Rosa helped another victim using her already built up connections: Recy Taylor, a black mother and sharecropper, who was kidnapped and gang-raped by several white men. Rosa Parks started the “Committee for Equal Justice for Mrs. Recy Taylor” with help of the NAACP, and it was later called the “strongest campaign for equal justice in a decade”. In 1949 Rosa Parks and other activists were involved in the case of a young black woman getting raped by two white police officers. Their protests made the story stay in the newspaper for nearly two months, and also secured a trial. In 1951, Rosa encouraged and helped this same network that protested two years earlier to start a boycott against a grocery store, who’s white owner raped a black teenager and was very successful, which was rare. In 1952, Rosa Parks unsuccessfully tried to free the black teenager Jeremiah Reevers who apparently raped a white woman. Rosa and the whole NAACP knew that the two teenagers had a sexual relationship, and that’s why it was even harder for them to watch the innocent Reevers get executed by Alabama officials in 1957, even though his case was challenged all the way up to the Supreme Court.

Answers to the Questions:

1. I don’t really know what I want to do for a living yet, and I still have time to think about that anyways, but it’s always good to have all my options open, and to have good grades to get into good colleges. Another one of my life goals, apart from having a good job, is to travel. I want to see so many places, visit so many countries, get to know and learn about other religions and cultures. For this, I sadly need money, for which the life goal described above is important again. For me, it’s also important to have good friends, which means I want to stay friends with all these people in Belgrade. This might be a bit difficult, since I’m moving away, but I got to know so many great people, and I want to stay in contact with all of them. Of course another goal right now is to have a good and fun life in Austria again, and also get to know new people, make new friends and experience new things. I also want to do some Community Service in Austria, and I hope I can find some place that I can help out, whatever it is I should do. So, entering high school, I want to improve my grades, make new friends and contribute to the community.
2. I always knew that Rosa Parks helped people and contributed to the civil rights movement before the bus incident, but now I know exactly how much she did. I also found it great that she founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development, and co-founded the Rosa L. Parks Scholarship Foundation for high school seniors that wanted to attend college. It is amazing that Rosa kept on giving speeches and encouraging people to do something for civil rights and black freedom, even after her husband AND her mother AND her brother died of cancer.
3. Rosa didn’t have many actual mentors, but her works and actions were inspired by several people. First, she got her will to earn her freedom from her mother and her grandfather. She also learnt a lot from working with Martin Luther King Jr. and working for John Conyers. Another one of her mentors and teachers was Septima Clark who was a civil rights activist working in the background, but who taught other activists how to control their temper and not fight back physically, but for example, release pictures of the cruel things whites did/do to blacks instead. Rosa learned a lot from her, and in the workshops Septima Clark gave. I don’t think Rosa had any special training, except being humiliated her whole life for having another skin color. Her life was training enough; the way she grew up with people always telling her she is not important, she doesn’t matter and that whites are the “good” or “better” people.

Here are two great sources I found, that also gave me a lot of information about Rosa Parks that I used in my essay.

http://www.montgomeryboycott.com/

This website gives you all the information you need and tells you all you want to know about the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which is what Rosa Parks became famous for. There is also a biography of Rosa Parks that you can use, although I used different ones. There are also many great pictures and you can find information on it that you might not know yet.

http://www.rosaparksfacts.com/

This second website was also really helpful to me. Again, it gives you a lot of information and details, but it's easy to understand. This website has many different links that you can click on to learn more about Rosa Parks. They have another biography, and more about her childhood and later years. There is a list of all the awards she earned, and her timeline, although that timeline doesn't include as much information as other parts of this website. There are more general facts, pictures and lots more.