What did Rosa Parks say that was so important?

Answer 1

She said she will not get up from her seat to a white person. Rosa Parks' simple act of defiance of the segregation laws that ruled the lives of black Americans and limited black Americans access to public services and accommodations set off a series of protest movements that brought these inequities to the attention of all Americans and eventually succeeded in overturning laws of discrimination.

On December 1, 1955, a normal day on her way home from work as a seamstress at a department store in downtown Montgomery Alabama, Rosa sat in the section of the bus which was designated by a sign as the seats for 'colored'. Eventually, all of the seats in the designated section for white passengers filled up and some white people were standing. The bus driver moved the sign back a few rows and told the seated black passengers to move back in the bus. Three of the black passengers in Rosa's row stood up, but Rosa did not; she refused. She had refused to comply with the segregation rules on the bus before and the driver had put her off the bus but this time the driver got a policeman and had her arrested.

Rosa and her husband Raymond had both been members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for many years and knew that the time had come to defy these segregation laws. The day after her arrest, representatives of that organization bailed her out of jail and the organization decided that her arrest was the example that they needed to publicize the need to overturn these laws. They organized the Montgomery bus boycott which encouraged all black citizens to stop using the city buses. The boycott was very effective because 75% of Montgomery's bus riders were black. Their efforts resulted in the Alabama supreme court overturning the bus segregation laws, which in turn empowered other groups in many places to stage formal protests against all segregation laws and eventually led to a national civil rights act to protect the rights of all Americans.

Rosa Parks joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1943 and devoted her life to the cause of American civil rights and equality, until her death in 2005 at age 92.