In key ways, then, the Montgomery Bus Boycott was not just a reaction to bus segregation but also to this pattern of injustice in the criminal justice system - and Rosa Parks’ determination to take a stand against it. Many years later, she told Emmett Till’s mother that she had thought of him at this moment. Howard, Mamie Till-Mobley (Emmett Till’s mother), U.S. Wiley Nash Carthan, Walter Billingsley, Dr. These men who had killed a 14-year-old went free. And yet still, Till’s killers were acquitted. With Till, people had brought enough attention - an incredible amount of attention - so there had actually been a trial. Most of these cases just got swept under the rug. A young Black minister that Raymond knew had been killed for appearing to make an advance at a white woman, as had their neighbor Hilliard Brooks for resisting on the bus. She’d sought protection for Black people and particularly Black men from false charges - like the Scottsboro boys and 16-year-old Jeremiah Reeves.

She had been fighting for years to get justice for Black people under the law - Recy Taylor and Gertrude Perkins who’d been raped, Viola White and Claudette Colvin who had been arrested for resisting on the bus. Rosa Parks was sickened, angry, depressed, horrified. This story is excerpted from the Rosa Parks biography website by Jeanne Theoharis. Howard was the lead organizer in the Emmett Till case, the 14-year-old Chicago boy who had been tortured and murdered near Money, Mississippi.įour days later, when bus driver James Blake told Parks to give up her seat - “pushed as far as she could be pushed,” she refused. 27, 1955 Rosa Parks attended a packed mass meeting at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church to hear Dr.

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