Read the excerpt from "Freedom Walkers” by Russell Freedman.Against great odds, Parks earned a high school diploma. At the time, Montgomery had no public high school for blacks. Rosa’s family, ambitious for her advancement, arranged to send her to the laboratory school at Alabama State College, which trained black teachers. Rosa cleaned classrooms to help pay her way through school. After starting the eleventh grade, she had to drop out to care for her ailing grandmother, but she managed to return to school after she married. Rosa received her diploma when she was twenty years old, becoming one of a small number of black high school graduates in the city at that time.
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Read the excerpt from "Freedom Walkers” by Russell Freedman.Parks made extra money by taking in sewing on the side. She had done some work for Virginia Durr, wife of attorney Clifford Durr, and the two women became friends. The Durrs, a white couple, were known in Montgomery as outspoken equal rights activists. They thought so highly of Parks’s civic activities that during the summer of 1955 they helped arrange a week’s stay for Rosa at the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, which held interracial workshops on how to promote integration. "That was the first time in my life I had lived in an atmosphere of complete equality with members of the other race,” Parks said later. "I did enjoy going up there.”
Read the excerpt from "Freedom Walkers” by Russell Freedman.In October 1955, several months after Claudette [Colvin] was convicted, Mary Louise Smith, an eighteen-year-old black girl, was arrested when she refused to move to the back of the bus so a white woman could take her seat. "[The driver] asked me to move three times,” Smith recalled. "And I refused. I told him, ‘I am not going to move out of my seat. I am not going to move anywhere. I got the privilege to sit here like anybody else does.’” Smith’s case did not create the furor that the Colvin case did, because Smith chose to plead guilty. She was fined five dollars. Once again, Nixon decided that Smith, like Colvin, wasn’t the right person to inspire a battle against bus segregation.
Read the excerpt from "Freedom Walkers” by Russell Freedman.Under Montgomery’s segregation laws, Claudette was in fact entitled to her seat behind the whites-only section. If no seats were available for blacks to move back to as additional white passengers boarded the bus, then they were not required to give up their seats. That was the official policy. But in actual practice, whenever a white person needed a seat, the driver would order blacks to get up and move to the back of the bus, even when they had to stand in the aisle.
Read the excerpts from "Freedom Walkers” by Russell Freedman.Excerpt 1By now, it was late Thursday evening. Nixon and the Durrs left and went home. Attorney Fred Gray, meanwhile, had learned about Parks’s arrest, had spoken with Rosa, and agreed to represent her. Then he called Jo Ann Robinson, whom he knew from the Claudette Colvin case, and Robinson, in turn, notified several fellow teachers who were members of the Women’s Political Council. "It was all happening quickly,” Gray recalled. "The mood was electric. This was the beginning of the Montgomery Bus Boycott.”Excerpt 2While the women were working, Robinson called Nixon at home to inform him of their plans for a boycott. He too had been busy throughout the night, phoning Montgomery’s black ministers and other civic leaders, urging them to attend a meeting Friday evening to mobilize support for both the boycott and for the legal defense of Rosa Parks.
Read the excerpt from "Freedom Walkers” by Russell Freedman.The fastest way to print copies of the letter [calling for the bus boycott] was on the mimeograph machines at Alabama State (high-speed modern copy machines were still in the future). However, the college was funded by the state, and the teachers were state employees. If officials learned that they had used taxpayer-owned facilities to challenge the segregation laws, then funding for the all-black school might be cut back and the teachers might lose their jobs. The women swore each other to secrecy. They wrote and revised their letter, changing it repeatedly in the early hours of Friday morning. Then they stayed up the rest of the night cutting stencils and mimeographing 52,500 leaflets.
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Read the excerpts from "Freedom Walkers” by Russell Freedman.Excerpt 1Jo Ann Robinson was inspired to write to Montgomery Mayor W. A. "Tacky” Gayle, demanding improved conditions for black riders on city buses and mentioning, for the first time, the possibility of a boycott."Mayor Gayle, three-quarters of the riders on these public conveyances are Negroes,” she wrote. "If Negroes did not patronize them they could not possibly operate. . . . There has been talk from twenty-five or more local organizations of planning a city-wide boycott of buses.”Excerpt 2"If we do not do something to stop these arrests, they will continue. The next time it may be you, or your daughter, or mother. This woman’s case will come up on Monday. We are, therefore, asking every Negro to stay off the buses Monday in protest of the arrest and trial.”
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