Black History Month is an annual observance in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom for remembrance of important people and events in the history of the African diaspora.
•Rosa Parks
Rosa Parks was an African-American Civil Rights activist, whom the United States Congress called "the first lady of civil rights" and "the mother of freedom movement".
Her birthday, February 4, and the day she was arrested, December 1, have both become Rosa Parks Day.
On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a 42-years-old woman who worked as a seamstress, boarded a city bus to go home.
She sat near the middle of the bus, just behind 10 seats reserved for white people. Soon all of the seats in the bus were filled. When a white man entered the bus, the driver (following the standard practice of segregation) insisted that all four blacks sitting just behind the white section give up their seats, so that man could sit there.
Mrs Parks quietly refused to give up her seat. Her action was spontaneous and not pre-meditated, although her civil rights involvement and strong sense of justice were obvious influences.
She was arrested and convicted of violating the laws of segregation. Mrs. Parks appealed her conviction and thus formally challenged the legality of segregation.
Mrs. Parks was not the first person to be prosecuted for violating the segregation laws on the city buses in Montgomery. She was, however, a woman of unchallenged character who was held in high esteem by all those who knew her. At the time of her arrest, Mrs. Parks was active in the local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)
At the same time, local civil rights activists initiated a boycott of the Montgomery bus system. In cities across the South, segregated bus companies were daily reminders of the inequities of American society. Since African Americans made up about 75 percent of the riders in Montgomery, the boycott posed a serious economic threat to the company and a social threat to white rule in the city.
A group named the Montgomery Improvement Association, composed of local activists and ministers, organized the boycott. As their leader, they chose a young Baptist minister, who was new to Montgomery: Martin Luther King, Jr.
After Mrs. Parks was convicted under city law, her lawyer filed a notice of appeal. While her appeal was tied up in the state court of appeals, a panel of three judges in the U.S. District Court for the region ruled in another case that racial segregation of public buses was unconstitutional. That case, called Browder v. Gayle, was decided on June 4, 1956. The ruling was made by a three-judge panel that included Frank M. Johnson, Jr., and upheld by the United States Supreme court on November 13, 1956.
Parks resided in Detroit until she died of natural causes at the age of 92 on October 24, 2005
