The Mother of the Civil Rights Movement

The Mother of the Civil Rights Movement

Reading comprehension
A. Answer these questions
1. Rosa Parks did not have happy memories of her childhood. Rosa was a small, sickly child. She was also subject to racial taunts by white children in her neighbourhood and she reacted to them physically.
2. Rosa married Raymond Parks who was a member of the NAACP. She soon became active in the Civil Rights Movement herself and was elected secretary of the Montgomery Chapter of the NACCP.
3. Following the Montgomery bus incident, Rosa was arrested but bailed out by friends. The incident
made her an icon of the Civil Rights Movement. She however lost her job as also her husband and they were forced to move in with her mother, brother and sister in law, who lived in Detroit. The civil rights activists used this to their advantage by starting a bus boycott. The boycott lasted all of 381 days before their demands for hire of blacks as bus drivers and seating on a first come first served basis were met.
4. In Detroit, schools were segregated. Services in the black neighbourhoods did not meet a minimum
standard of their white counterparts. Rosa worked to solve issues of education, discrimination in jobs,
welfare and affordable housing.
5. After marriage, prodded by her husband, Rosa completed her high school education. Later while
working as a housekeeper and seamstress for a white couple, with the help of their sponsorship, she
studied at the Highlander Folk School, an education centre for activism in worker’s rights and racial
equality.
B. Think and Answer
1. The experiences Rosa had in her childhood definitely built up to culminate in the Montgomery bus
incident. As said in the passage, “She was tired of giving in every time right from her childhood, it was
now time for action, she thought.”
2. Yes, Rosa Parks did get recognition for her work, both during her life time and after. She received
the NACCP’s highest award and the prestigious Martin Luther King Jr Award. In 1996, she received
the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 199, she was listed in Time magazine’s list of the twenty most
influential people of the twentieth century. On the day of her funeral, all the front seats in the city
buses of Detroit and Montgomery were reserved with black ribbons in her honour. Eight years later,
on her 100th birthday, the US Postal Service released a commemorative stamp called the Rosa Parks
Forever stamp.
C. Answer these questions with reference to the context.
1. a. The “that” being referred to is the fact that the bus took the white children to their school while the black children had to walk to theirs.
b. Rosa said that they had no choice because the bus carried only the white children to their school
and the black children studied in a different school.
c. Rosa realized that the white children had a separate world with their schools and their school buses
while the black children had a separate world with their schools and no buses.
2. a. Rosa said these words because there was no racial segregation at Maxwell Air Force Base and while working there she rode on an integrated trolley and realized that there is an integrated world and there did not necessarily have to be a segregation into black and white worlds.
b. Maxwell was the federal property, Maxwell Air Force Base.
c. Rosa had hitherto only seen two segregated words, one for the whites and the other for the blacks
and had believed that was the way of life. Life here was different in that everything was integrated.
She even got to ride on an integrated trolley with the whites. Thus her eyes were opened to an
integrated world.