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ROSA

On 1st December 1955, at Montgomery in Alabama, Rosa Louise Parks, a black housemaid, boarded the bus home and sat in the only free seat in the vehicle’s front section, i.e. the section reserved for white people. Several white passengers boarded the bus at the next stop and the driver ordered her to move to the back of the bus, the section reserved for blacks. Rosa refused and the driver stopped the bus and called the police. Rosa was arrested and imprisoned. That night, the leaders of the Afro-American community, led by the then rising star Protestant Church minister Martin Luther King, gathered to discuss actions to be taken to respond to what had happened. The next day marked the start of the boycott of public transport in Montgomery that lasted as many as 381 days, until the law legalising racial segregation was finally repealed. In 1956 the case reached the Supreme Court of the United States of America that unanimously decreed that racial segregation on Alabama buses was unconstitutional. From that moment onwards, Rosa Parks became the icon of the civil rights movement. She received death threats and lost all chances of finding a job so she moved to Detroit, Michigan, where in the ’60 she worked as a seamstress. From ’65 to ’88, she worked as a Congressman’s secretary. In 1987 she established the "Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development" and in 1999 she was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal. The bus, now exhibited at the Henry Ford Museum in Deaborn, Michigan, was n. 2857 and it was where Rosa Parks’ revolutionary spark was struck. Martin Luther King described it as "the individual expression of a timeless yearning for human dignity and freedom. She was anchored to that seat by the accumulated indignities of days gone by and the boundless aspirations of generations yet unborn". Corel Draw vector graphics were used for the illustration that was then developed using Corel Photo Paint tools.