Rosa Parks - Equality Song

 Rosa Parks
In 1955, one night in Alabama, a black seamstress was trying to get home after a long day of work. When white people boarded the bus she was instructed to vacate her seat and move to the back of the bus. When she refused, the police were called and she was arrested. Later, she would always deny that she refused to give up her seat because she was physically tired. “The only tired I was,” she said, “was tired of giving in.” Rosa Parks’ arrest was not the first such one, but it was used as a rallying cry for civil rights activists.
One of the biggest differences in the way protesters of the pre-modern civil rights movements behaved was dictated by gender. While male protesters were often brutalized and even lynched, female protesters were often subjected to sexual violence as a way to discourage acts of social and political protest, legally defined and punishable by Jim Crow law as civil disobedience.

 (VIDEO; Put Racism in the right place)

A one-day boycott was called of the bus system in Montgomery on the day of her trial. The boycott would eventually last over a year, and would only end when segregation on the buses did. While never one of the great leaders of the civil rights movement, she did become an icon and continued to speak for the end of segregation. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, in 1996.

 Rosa Parks Equality Song