Rosa Parks:
The Courage to Sit

📖 The Story

Montgomery's buses had a rule: Black passengers had to sit in the back. Front rows were for white passengers only. If the bus got full, Black passengers had to give up their seats even if no white passenger was standing.

Rosa Parks was not just a tired seamstress — she was a trained civil rights activist, secretary of the Montgomery NAACP for 12 years, and had studied nonviolent resistance at Highlander Folk School in Tennessee. She knew exactly what she was doing on December 1, 1955.

📖 The Story

Rosa boarded the Cleveland Avenue bus after a long day of work as a seamstress. She sat in the first row of the "colored" section. When the bus filled up, driver James Blake told Rosa and three other Black passengers to move back so a white man could sit. The others moved. Rosa did not.

📖 The Story

The night Rosa was arrested, Jo Ann Robinson — a professor and NAACP leader — stayed up all night and printed 52,500 flyers and passed them through the city. The message was simple:

On Monday morning, the buses were empty. 40,000 Black residents walked, carpooled, rode mules, and stayed home. The boycott lasted 381 days. On November 13, 1956, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Browder v. Gayle that bus segregation was unconstitutional. The community had won.

📖 The Story

Rosa Parks did not stop after the boycott. She continued fighting for justice for the rest of her life. She worked with Congressman John Conyers for 23 years, helping people in need. In 1996, President Clinton awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom — the highest honor a civilian can receive. In 1999, she received the Congressional Gold Medal.

Rosa passed away on October 24, 2005. She became the first woman in American history to lie in honor in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda.

🗓 Timeline

📖 The Lesson

Just like Rosa Parks had a perspective shaped by her experiences, AI systems are shaped by the data and choices people make when building them. When a story leaves out important facts, or focuses only on one person's point of view, it can create a biased picture.

The "tired woman" story leaves out that Rosa was a strategic activist. Perspective is the lens through which someone sees the world. Rosa's perspective was shaped by decades of injustice. An AI's perspective is shaped by the data it was trained on.

📖 How It Works

In a Harkness table talk, you speak directly to each other — not just to the teacher. The goal is to build on each other's ideas, challenge respectfully, and make sure every voice is heard. Use these sentence stems to join in:

• "I agree with ___ because ___"
• "I disagree with ___ because ___"
• "To add onto what ___ said about ___, I think ___"