On this day 55 years ago, a woman named Rosa Parks kick-started the modern civil rights movement when the then-42-year-old refused to leave her seat in the colored section of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama.  She’d been working all day at the Montgomery Fair department store and felt like she shouldn’t have to give up her seat when the driver told her to move so as to allow white passengers to sit.  She didn’t move and was arrested for it.  Today Google honors the 55th Anniversary of Rosa Parks’s stand against institutionalized racism by making a Google Doodle in her honor.

The number of the bus in Google’s Doodle is 2857, which is the number of the bus on which Parks refused to give up her seat.  As she said in an interview with NPR in 1992:  “I did not want to be mistreated, I did not want to be deprived of a seat that I had paid for.  It was just time… there was opportunity for me to take a stand to express the way I felt about being treated in that manner.  I had not planned to get arrested.  I had plenty to do without having to end up in jail.  But when I had to face that decision, I didn’t hesitate to do so because I felt that we had endured that too long.  The more we gave in, the more we complied with that kind of treatment, the more oppressive it became.”

These days, people don’t really know what real racism is.  Being told to pull up your pants is not racist; being beaten and attacked by dogs because you want to be able to eat lunch or go through the front door of a building is completely racist.

Tags: Rosa Parks, Montgomery Bus Boycott, 55th Anniversary of Rosa Parks, Rosa Parks bus incident, bus 2857, Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks arrest, civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr., civil rights, racism

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