Dec. 1 Declared As Rosa Parks Day In Montgomery County

SILVER SPRING, MD — On Dec. 1, 1955, Rosa Parks stood up for Black America by sitting down.

On Tuesday — exactly 65 years after she refused to give up her seat to a White man on an Alabama city bus — officials in Montgomery County have issued a proclamation recognizing her contributions to the civil rights movement.

County Executive Marc Elrich and Council President Sidney Katz presented the proclamation, which declared Dec. 1 as Rosa Parks Day, during a virtual council session.

"Rosa Parks engaged in an act that challenged the status quo for the time," Elrich said. "The simple act of sitting in a seat on a bus that she was prohibited from sitting in ... it crystallized the absurdity of a society that felt the need to determine something so basic as where a person was supposed to sit on a bus based on their (skin) color."

Echoing that sentiment, Katz said: "one of the real pleasures of doing proclamations is it makes me, and I'm sure others, go back and read again why a person" was an agent of change.

For refusing to give up her seat to a White man, Parks was arrested for civil disobedience. Her arrest sparked a 381-day boycott of the Montgomery, Alabama, bus system and indirectly led to a 1956 Supreme Court decision banning segregation on public transportation.

"Rosa Parks Day is so significant to me," Jim Stowe, director of the county's human rights office, said. "Rosa Parks illustrates the power of one. The refusal to let the status quo be the status quo, particularly when it is simply wrong."

He encouraged Montgomery County residents to pattern their behavior after Parks, and to stand up against injustice and unfairness.

Parks is widely considered "the mother of the freedom movement. But at the time, her actions cost her job as a seamstress at a Montgomery, Alabama, department store. She subsequently moved with her mother and husband, Raymond, to Detroit, Michigan, to start anew. While there, she worked in U.S. Representative John Conyers' district office.

In 1987 — a decade after her husband died — she helped found the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development, a nonprofit aimed at empowering and educating the youth about civil rights.

She died at the age of 92 on Oct. 24, 2005.