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In the chapter that discuses Rosa arks from the book Who Wants
to Start A Revolution, it begins by discussing the legends funeral
service and how she is often remembered as a quite, soft spoken, older
seamstress who was just fed up and refused to give up her seat on a
Montgomery bus. What is often left out of the story is how Rosa Parks
had been radical for over 60 years before her death and never took a
back seat when it came to Civil Rights issues. While the reason for this
stems from many different things, many people have a hard time
believing that someone who is radical can also be respectable. This is
because radicalism is often seen as something that means one is
acting emotionally rather than rationally but people often fail to realize
that these categories are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
Growing up, Rosa Parks often witnessed the advantages of being
white in America and in the south in particular. After she married her
husband she became to be much more active in the fight for Civil
Rights and joined the NAACP in 1943. In 1955, while she was working
as the Alabama NAACP secretary, she refused to move seats for a
white man who got on the bus. She was arrested for this
demonstration of resistance. Prior to this, two other girls were arrested
for refusing to move, one 15 and the other 18. However, the president
of the NAACP thought Parks would be the perfect case to invoke
change in Alabama. Her one act of protest quickly turned into the