Who Exactly Was Rosa Parks?
And Other Early Civil Rights Influencers
Rosa Parks is mostly known as the African American woman who refused to move from her seat for a white person on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama. An act which resulted in her arrest and the Montgomery Bus Boycott led by Martin Luther King, Jr. This occurred on December 1, 1955, and is considered the beginning of the modern civil rights movement.
But Rosa Parks was much more and was active in civil rights well before King came on the scene and long after. Her life, significance, and legacy will be discussed but there were other people and history, little-known today, important in the early years’ evolution of the civil rights movement.
Understanding the times, people and events leading to the modern civil rights movement are critical to fully appreciating what a struggle it has been, and still is to achieve the promise of the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteeing equal rights for all.
Reconstruction At Civil War’s End
Just after the end of the Civil War, the federal government enacted a program known as Reconstruction intended to rebuild the states of the former Confederacy. Reconstruction lasted from President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, to the Compromise of 1877.
