On 1 December 1955, Rosa Parks, a 42-year-old black woman who had just completed her day's work in a department store in Montgomery, Alabama, was arrested for refusing to surrender her seat on a city bus to a white passenger, as required by municipal law. The incident sparked a year-long bus boycott, the beginning of the modern phase of the civil rights revolution. And it made Parks, the 'seamstress with tired feet' (she was a tailor's assistant), an international symbol of ordinary blacks' determination to resist the daily injustices and indignities of the Jim Crow South.

LRB 10 May 2001 | PDF Download