Why did the arrest of a woman named Rosa Parks change American Life?
In its historic judgment, the Supreme Court gave the civil rights movement its Ten Commandments. What the movement lacked was its Moses. Rosa Parks may not have been Moses, but she certainly was a voice crying out from Egyptian bondage. In 1955, Egypt was Montgomery, Alabama. A forty-three-year-old seamstress who worked in a downtown Montgomery department store, Rosa Parks was on her way home from work on a December day. Loaded down by bags filled with her Christmas shopping, Rosa Parks boarded a city bus and moved to the back—legally, traditionally, and, it seemed, eternally—the Negro section. Finding no seats there, she took one toward the middle of the bus. When the driver picked up more white passengers, he called out, “Niggers move back,” an order to vacate the white seats even if it meant standing. Mrs. Parks refused. Active in the local chapter of the NAACP, Rosa Parks had already decided that she would make a stand if asked to give up her seat. Unwilling to leave that seat, Ros
