Under the winter canopy at Capitol Park, a Sacramento Regional Transit bus served as a reminder Feb. 9 of a December evening in 1955 that changed American history.
For local historian Michael Harris, who organized Sacramento’s 26th annual Rosa Parks Day with SacRT, the story does not begin or end with a bus seat.
“Rosa Parks was 42 years old,” Harris said. “She wasn’t an old lady. She was a young seamstress, trying to get home. It wasn’t staged.”
On Dec. 1, 1955, Parks refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a segregated Montgomery, Alabama, bus. Her arrest sparked the 381-day Montgomery Bus Boycott, led by a then-26-year-old Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and eventually led to a Supreme Court ruling declaring bus segregation unconstitutional.
But long before that moment, Parks was deeply embedded in civil rights work.
A 1956 General Motors bus, provided by Sacramento Regional Transit, resembles the one in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks rode when she famously refused to yield her seat. Louis Bryant III, OBSERVER
Born in 1913 in Tuskegee, Alabama, Parks grew up in the Jim Crow South, where racial terror and segregation shaped daily life. As a teenager, she attended the Montgomery Industrial School for Girls, a progressive institution that emphasized self-worth and resistance to injustice. She later became secretary of the Montgomery NAACP, a role she held for more than a decade.
In that role, Parks investigated cases of racial violence, including the 1944 abduction and gang rape of Recy Taylor, a Black woman attacked by white men in Alabama. Parks helped organize national attention around the case, forming the Committee for Equal Justice for Mrs. Recy Taylor. This work put her in significant personal danger.
“Nobody else could do that or would do that,” Harris said.
Months before her arrest, Parks attended a training workshop at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, where activists studied nonviolent protest strategies and labor organizing. Her opposition on the bus was not spontaneous; it was rooted in years of political education and organizing.
“It wasn’t random,” Harris said. “She knew exactly what she was doing.”
Harris’ connection to Parks’ legacy is personal. His mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother lived in the South. He has traveled to Montgomery, sat in the church where leaders organized the bus boycott, and reflected on the intergenerational courage required to challenge segregation.
“To have this strong connection with the legacy of Rosa Parks, and to impart some of my knowledge to whoever comes out here, particularly kids, is fulfilling,” Harris said. “That’s why I do it.”
The narrative of Parks as simply a tired seamstress has endured for decades. In reality, her refusal to stand followed years of activism and came with consequences.
After the boycott, Parks and her husband, Raymond, lost their jobs and experienced ongoing harassment. In 1957, they moved to Detroit, seeking safety and opportunity. Instead, they experienced years of financial hardship, living with relatives before Parks secured a job in the office of U.S. Rep. John Conyers. She worked there for more than 20 years, assisting constituents in some of Detroit’s poorest neighborhoods and continuing her support for civil rights, economic justice, and the establishment of Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a federal holiday.
Mary Harris, left, and state Sen. Akilah Weber-Pierson chat at the Rosa Parks Day celebration. Louis Bryant III OBSERVER
“The vast majority of her life was not in Alabama,” Harris said. “She kept working.”
For Harris, Rosa Parks Day represents more than a commemoration of one act of resistance. This serves as a call to reconnect with a larger legacy that extends from Montgomery to Detroit and beyond U.S. borders.
He explained that historian Carter G. Woodson founded Negro History Week in 1926, which later became Black History Month. Woodson’s mission, Harris noted, was to center global Black excellence and reconnect African Americans to their historical roots.
As the program concluded, the bus remained parked in Capitol Park as a reminder not only of a moment of refusal but of a lifetime of resolve.
Rosa Parks was not simply seated that day in 1955. She was prepared. She was organized. And, as Harris reminds people each year, she was part of something much larger than a single ride home.
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