STEP-BY-STEP
FREEDOM

Topics: Leadership; Preparation; Racism; Seasons

Reference: Romans 5:3

Rosa Parks’s decision not to ride in the “blacks only” section of the bus in 1955 was anything but impulsive. Rather, the woman whose action ignited the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, becoming a key victory in the civil rights movement, had been working for the emancipation of blacks for many years.

Parks had spent the previous twelve years helping lead the local NAACP chapter. The summer before, she had attended a ten-day training session in Tennessee at a labor and civil rights organizing school. For some time she had been studying other bus boycotts, and she had already been arrested in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, two years earlier for participating in one.

So when she boarded that bus in Montgomery and sat where blacks weren’t allowed, she was armed, chapter and verse, for what would follow.

—“Change Happens Slowly,” Utne Reader (July–August 1999)