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This is great for folks who still don't know the history of Mrs. Parks or the Montgomery Bus Boycott. But the real history of the boycott, as a decade-long mvmt for Black women's bodily autonomy, is better than the fairy tale & this essay @jdesmondharris https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/01/opinion/rosa-parks.html
The radical roots of the Montgomery Bus Boycott begin in 1944, when armed white men in Abbeville, AL kidnapped & raped Mrs. Recy Taylor, a young Black mother and sharecropper. The Montgomery NAACP heard about the assault and sent their best investigator. Her name: Rosa Parks.
Rosa Parks had family in Abbeville. She heard about the brutal assault from them & rushed to Taylor's house. She arrived w/ a notebook and a pen and carried Taylor's testimony back to Montgomery, where she and the city's most militant activists got to work.
They created the "Committee for Equal Justice for Mrs. Recy Taylor" & launched a national & international mvmt that the Chicago Defender called "the strongest campaign for equal justice to be seen in a decade." It was 11 years before Rosa Parks would be arrested in Montgomery.
The 1944 Recy Taylor case brought the building blocks of the Bus Boycott together & kept them in place until it became Rosa Parks' turn to testify in 1955. During that decade, she centered Black women and girls' right to bodily integrity in the struggle for racial justice.
In 1949, Rosa Parks was undoubtedly part of a similar campaign to get justice for Gertrude Perkins, a young Black woman raped by 2 white Montgomery policemen. Perkins told Rev. Solomon Seay about the assault & he called on the same people who organized to defend Recy Taylor.
They formed the "Citizens Committee for Gertrude Perkins" and demanded justice. Their public protests forced a grand jury and brought the city's disparate Black ministers and civil rights organizations together. Rev. Solomon Seay would be one of the 89 arrested in the bus boycott
Rosa Parks & her radical allies banded together again in 1951 to demand justice for Flossie Hardman, a Black teenager assaulted by her white employer Sam Green. Hardman's parents reached out to Montgomery NAACP & other activists after Green was acquitted. He owned a grocery store
Black activists knew that Black people shopped at Green's grocery store & if they couldn't get justice in the courts, they could surely put him out of business. So they began a boycott. Within 2 weeks, they shut it down. Someone may have also tried to firebomb it....
The campaign was led by the Women's Political Council & NAACP under the banner of protecting Black womanhood. Its success proved that the boycott could be a powerful weapon for justice & sent a message that African Americans wouldn't allow white men to abuse Black women & girls.
The city editor of the Montgomery Advertiser, the 'white' newspaper said that these cases, in particular the Perkins case, "had as much to do with the bus boycott" as anything on earth. Soon enough Black women began filing complaints of sexual & physical abuse on the buses.
Working class Black women made up 80% of the bus ridership. The bus was not "optional, like restaurants," Atty Fred Gray said. In 1953 they filed >30 complaints of abuse, mistreatment & assault by bus drivers, arguing that buses were sites of racial & sexual violence.
In 1954, Jo Ann Robinson, the wise & daring leader of the Women's Political Council threatened the mayor with a mass boycott of the buses if Black women riders weren't respected and treated with dignity. He ignored her demands as the injustices piled up.
Many Black women had already launched their own mini-boycotts. In fact, Rosa Parks refused to ride any buses driven by James F. Blake, who mistreated her in 1943. She kept up her boycott of him, personally, until December 1, 1955, the day she was arrested on a bus he was driving.
Other Black women refused to ride, too. This spotty boycott continued through 1954. When 15 y.o. Claudette Colvin was arrested in March 1955, members of the Women's Political Council prepared for a mass boycott & formed the "Citizens Coordinating Committee" (notice the trend?)
Rosa Parks was Colvin's advisor in the NAACP Youth Council. Colvin knew the law and feared what might await her after her arrest. When police grabbed her & threw her in the patrol car, she said, "I started protecting my crotch, I was afraid they might rape me."
When members of the Citizens Coord. Cmte, the WPC & the NAACP petitioned the city to end abuse of Black women & girls on the buses, Rosa Parks refused to go. "I had decided," she said, "that I would not go anywhere w/ a piece of paper in my hand asking white folk for any favors."
Because she was so perfect for the role, it's tempting to think Rosa Parks planned her own arrest. She was, afterall, "more actively involved in the struggle against racial discrimination...than all but a tiny handful of Montgomery's 40,000 black citizens." But it is unlikely...
Instead, when Parks had an opportunity to resist, she seized it. Her decision to stay put on 12/1/55 was rooted in her history as a radical activist & decades witnessing injustice--from Recy Taylor to Gertrude Perkins to Claudette Colvin. She had grown up in the Garvey movement..
She & her husband labored in the Scottsboro struggle as a young couple. In 1944 her investigation of the Recy Taylor case launched a national crusade. Her work with the NAACP, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, & other orgs placed her at the center of the Black Freedom Mvmt
long before anyone tried to move her to the back of the bus. Rosa Parks's decision to keep her seat that day in December was less a mystery than a moment; a moment rooted in a larger struggle for Black women's right to move through the world unmolested.
Black women led the Montgomery Bus Boycott; they raised the money for it; ran the day-to-day operations incl. the ingenious carpool program (an early Uber) & they filled the pews at the mass meetings. And, of course they walked...which brought the city to its knees.
It's not just Rosa Parks the radical activist who was written out of the story of the bus boycott. Jo Ann Robinson and her army of women in the WPC, as well as thousands of Black working-class women who made Montgomery the "walking city," were reduced to the footnotes of history.
The Montgomery bus boycott was not the opening scene of the modern civil rights movement, but the last act of a decades long effort to protect Black women and girls from racialized sexual violence and harassment. When the boycott took off, no one called it a women's movement...
though many observers then and since note the centrality of Black women in its ranks. Even Dr. King credited "the zeitgeist" when asked to comment on the seemingly spontaneous combustion of the bus boycott. But the Montgomery Bus Boycott was not a prairie fire or a rising tide...
or a gear that tumbled in the cosmos. It was another in a series of campaigns that began when Rosa Parks drove to Abbeville to gather the facts in the Recy Taylor case so that Black women could tell their stories.
Like Rosa Parks, many other African Americans cut their political teeth defending Black women like Taylor, and brought their experiences & organizational insights to other struggles for dignity and justice in the 1950s and 1960s. Like Parks, they often became pillars of the CRM.
The campaign to defend Recy Taylor highlighted the power of sexual stories to mobilize communities & build coalitions. Black people throughout the US risked their lives & livelihoods on behalf of Black women's right to bodily integrity This cuts to the heart of what freedom means
Because it doesn't matter where you can sit on a bus or in a restaurant or a theater if you can't move through the world without being assaulted, manhandled and mistreated. Rosa Parks knew that from and fought for far more than a seat on a bus or a place at the table.
Understanding Rosa Parks' work on behalf of Recy Taylor, Gertrude Perkins, Flossie Hardman, & later--Joan Little, who was assaulted by a white sheriff while imprisoned in NC, enables us to center her in a more radical, instersectional history of the freedom movement.
An intersectional approach enables us to draw a line from the Citizens Committee for Equal Justice for Mrs. Recy Taylor all the way to the #SayHerName campaign. We can place Rosa Parks at the center of a longer struggle for justice and Black women's bodily autonomy #BHM 
