north carolina rosa parks essay

UNC Player Wrote This Paper On Rosa Parks And Somehow Still Got An A- In The Class (UPDATE)

UPDATE: 2:00 p.m. -- Earlier Friday morning, the whistleblower who provided the paper to ESPN clarified on Twitter that it wasn't the paper that received an A-, the student nabbed the high mark as their final grade:

Clarification on RP paper that went viral.It was a final essay for an intro class.Final grade in class A-.Not a real education. #ncaareform — Mary Willingham (@paperclassinc) March 28, 2014

How hard do college athletes have to work in class? At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the answer appears to be "not very."

This image from an ESPN report shows what's supposed to be a final paper written by a player in one of the school's athletics programs. It might get a C- in an elementary school (and that's being generous), but at UNC, it earned an A-:

Whistleblower says UNC put athletes in classes that never met and required only one final paper. This one got an A-. pic.twitter.com/HShyr6ivGm — Bryan Armen Graham (@BryanAGraham) March 26, 2014

To save your eyes, here's what the paper says:

Rosa Parks: My Story On the evening of December Rosa Parks decided that she was going to sit in the white people section on the bus in Montgomery, Alabama. During this time blacks had to give up there seats to whites when more whites got on the bus. Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat. Her and the bus driver began to talk and the conversation went like this. “Let me have those front seats” said the driver. She didn’t get up and told the driver that she was tired of giving her seat to white people. “I’m going to have you arrested,” said the driver. “You may do that,” Rosa Parks responded. Two white policemen came in and Rosa Parks asked them “why do you all push us around?” The police officer replied and said “I don’t know, but the law is the law and you’re under arrest.

The paper controversy comes amid a growing scandal with claims of academic fraud, fake classes and no-show classes at the university designed to help push athletes through the school so they can keep playing while maintaining grades.

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The UNC QB Who Wrote The Famous 148-Word "Rosa Parks Essay" Speaks Out

Caleb Pressley is the UNC quarterback who authored this essay , which went viral after appearing on HBO's Real Sports With Bryant Gumbel.

Pressley, currently studying abroad in Scotland, took to his personal blog to speak out on the essay, the business of college sports, and more. We'd encourage anyone who saw the essay floating around social media to hear what Pressley has to say about it (quoted directly from his own posting):

I have assembled you all here today to finally, and officially, address my Rosa Parks essay that has underwent such wicked scrutiny from media outlets across the nation over the past few weeks. Even though I am currently on a hedonic, yet platonic sabbatical in Edinburgh, Scotland, it has come to my attention that many people are very displeased with the AFAM41 final that I wrote / dictated to my iPhone Siri. The fact that I have found out about this all the way in Scotland forces me to accept the importance of this issue. I say this is because Scottish newspapers do not often discuss American college news that is unrelated to Belle Knox. This lack of American newspaper coverage is supplemented by the undeniable fact that I read on a fourth grade level. Yet, somehow through all of these obstacles, news of my essay has found me, and I now I feel it my duty to issue a response.   All student-athlete football players who now play at NCAA institutions go through a complicated recruiting process. This process begins when all of the Division I football coaches in the nation send high schools requests for the names of their best and brightest students. Once that list of all-star pupils is made and sent back to the programs, the coaches are then able to proceed by thumbing through the names one by one and inquiring into whether or not these incredible students might have any potential talent at American football. This process is done to ensure that once players finally arrive on campus, they will be students first, and athletes second.   I, on the other hand, found a loophole to get around all the pointless investigation into my academic affairs. Due to a combination of Olympic-caliber genes, and a personal blessing given to me at the moment of my birth by Pope John Paul II, by the time I was in high school I possessed the uncanny ability to throw a leather pigskin 215 yards through the air. This sensual skill seduced coaches, who were otherwise only concerned with academics, to recruit me in spite of my subpar marks in the unimportant realm of institutionalized learning.   You might say, “But Caleb, what about the minimum GPA and standardized testing scores that are required for entry into any NCAA institution?” My response is simple: “LOL!”   If major universities are tempted to alter academic information so that their star players can continue to play, do you not think it possible that a high school that is held accountable to a significantly smaller population of significantly less important people might be capable of making a slight alteration to an academic record here or there? Needless to say, right or wrong, bad or outright terrible for State fans, I became a University of North Carolina Tar Heel.   And then, before I knew it, I was enrolled in this “paper class,” in which I was told that I had to write one paper that would determine my final grade. Per uszche, I procrastinated for a bit, and ended up writing the entire essay while racing my scooter to turn it in by the deadline. I was deeply and briefly troubled by the amount of pedestrian injuries I caused on that scooter ride, but my sadness soon subsided days later when I got my grade back:  A- .   Just like I used to say to my high school basketball coach, “Don’t put me in the game unless you want me to put up a few deep threes, and then get ejected for taunting.” I don’t really know how to tie that quote in to this particular story, other than just letting you know that I have so much self-confidence that it might just be a cover-up for an extreme depravity of social skills and the aforementioned self-confidence.   Shortly after news broke to the public of my short and sweet depiction of the life of Rosa Parks, all hell began to break lose. Pretty soon, my paper class professor got fired, and every step was taken to make sure he would never be involved with an academic career for the rest of his life. He wasn’t the only one though. My head coach, Butch Davis, was then fired three days before the start of our season, only later to be joined by the rest of his staff immediately after our season ended. Soon after that, Athletic Director Dick Baddour stepped down from his position, and then before I knew it the situation ultimately led to the resignation of our Chancellor, Holden Thorpe. A beautiful red cherry was placed on top of it all when our football team—that no longer contained hardly any of the parties involved in the scandal—received a one-year bowl ban (in which we would have played in the ACC Championship Game), as well as a scholarship reduction, and a few years of probation. Of course, every step of this process was well documented by major media outlets who seemed utterly shocked that collegiate athletes might not be able to compete in the classroom with more qualified students who don’t have to work a fulltime job in order to maintain their financial aid. I am no aquatic aficionado, but with all of these consequences in mind, it does seem that by this point, the whole academic scandal should be considered as “water under the bridge.”   Then along comes a woman named Mary Willingham, whom I have never met personally. Since I do not know this woman, I shall not use this forum as an opportunity to ask her why she is so intent on devaluing my Carolina Degree, or make really funny jokes about some of her questionable antics. Instead, I will focus on some of the important points she has raised that are bringing awareness to the impracticality of the current NCAA system.   As a naturally curious person, and as someone who is directly affected by this situation, I would like to ask just a few questions to whoever might deem themselves intelligent enough to answer them:   Do you think if a kid can’t read, we should 1) bring massive media attention to it and thereby humiliate the athlete in question, or 2) teach them to read? Would it be impossible for our University to offer athletes who are unable to succeed in advanced classes—by nature of their lower entrance scores and less glamorous academic backgrounds—the attention and academic programs that might be more suited for their level of learning? Whether or not these programs would qualify their participants for a full university degree, couldn’t they still be put in place in order to offer athletes a certificate, or lower degree that would enable them to take at least something away from this University, after four or five years of the University taking so much from them? Is it unreasonable to believe that athletes pursuing a regular full degree and athletes pursuing some type of lesser degree could coexist on the same football team in order to make millions of dollars for our University?   It is obvious that college football is a business. With this in mind, don’t customers want to see the best product—in this case football—put forth into the marketplace? Would this product not improve if academic standards did not prohibit the most talented athletes from partaking? Does it really make sense that all of the athletes who play football would have to be at the same academic level with the same post-athletic goals? Wouldn’t some of these talented individuals who aren’t qualified for a full university education still be good enough at their sport to later advance to the professional level, and thereby be provided extremely high paying jobs that they might otherwise never be able to obtain? Would the football team in general not benefit from having the best players on the field? And wouldn’t a better football team make more money for the university? And isn’t it proven that athletic success raises interest from prospective students, which would in turn make the University even more academically competitive?   Are all systems canonized? Is it okay to acknowledge that a system doesn’t quite make sense? Would it be okay to march for logical change to this institution that is clearly not working as it should? Would the value of Carolina degrees decrease, or be enhanced by the fact that not every athlete would have to pursue the same degree as the rest as the student body? Wouldn’t the non-qualifiers who could instead receive degrees comparable to a two-year community college be in better shape in their post-athletic careers than they would have if they didn’t have someone to fund and provide this type of education for them? Who gets hurt in these situations? Is change inherently evil? Can obvious concepts such as independence between different levels of learning coincide with a community that values what every member of the institution brings to the table?? Do we really want diversity? Do we really care about the advancement for all contributors to the University of North Carolina?   As some of you might already know, it was not in fact me who wrote the Rosa Parks paper. However, what is true is that I never would have had the opportunity to attend the University of North Carolina had I not been a good football player. I had many friends in high school with better grades and SAT scores than me who were denied entry to this university. The only reason I was accepted is because I have a semi-automatic weapon for a right arm, and because I blackmailed many powerful people with connections to the school. However, I like to believe I am still able to contribute to the culture and community of UNC, and I think the same can be said for the vast majority of the football team that I have been lucky enough to be a part of.   Let’s just call college football what it is: a big business. This is the first step in effecting change in which, instead of being ridiculed, under qualified athletes—who are undeniably assets to the University of North Carolina community—can continue to contribute, and receive academic support appropriate to their needs. I salute everyone across the country that has made it his or her duty to take this first step. I would join in, but I’m far too busy drinking Scotch and going for the Ripley’s land speed record for football throw.   Until Next Time, C P.S. Regardless of what it might seem like in the media, this problem is NOT isolated to UNC.

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Here’s the Awful 146-Word “Essay” That Earned an A- for a UNC Jock

Photo by Grant Halverson/Getty Images

The University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill has already been embroiled in a scandal for allowing its athletes to enroll in fake courses for easy credit. Now, the whole controversy has a rather potent visual symbol to go along with it: a 146-word, ungrammatical essay on Rosa Parks that earned an A- for a real intro class.*

Mary Willingham, who spent a decade tutoring and advising UNC’s jocks before turning into a whistleblower, unveiled the paper during an interview with ESPN . As the segment explains, academically troubled UNC athletes were encouraged to sign up for so-called “paper classes”—which were essentially no-work independent studies involving a single paper that allowed functionally illiterate football players to prop up their GPAs, thus satisfying the NCAA’s eligibility requirements. While viewers were not treated to any of the “work” produced in those courses, Willingham did show this paper she later clarified was written for an actual intro class, in which the athlete finished with an A-:

Screenshot of ESPN.com

And here’s the text.

On the evening of December Rosa Parks decided that she was going to sit in the  white people section on the bus in Montgomery, Alabama. During this time blacks had to give up there seats to whites when more whites got on the bus. Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat. Her and the bus driver began to talk and the conversation went like this. “Let me have those front seats” said the driver. She didn’t get up and told the driver that she was tired of giving her seat to white people. “I’m going to have you arrested,” said the driver. “You may do that,” Rosa Parks responded. Two white policemen came in and Rosa Parks asked them “why do you all push us around?” The police officer replied and said “I don’t know, but the law is the law and you’re under arrest.

It seems fitting that this image is making the rounds just one day after a National Labor Relations Board official ruled that football players at Northwestern University were not primarily students but rather employees of the school. That’s not to say Northwestern was running a similar scam (Disclosure: I’m an alum) . But the point is that those who think that most big-time college athletes are at school first and foremost to be educated are fooling themselves. They’re there to work and earn money and prestige for the school.

And really, what are the chances that other schools aren’t mimicking UNC? In 2010, before Willingham started feeding information to reporters, UNC’s football program, for instance, had a 75 percent graduation rate, lower than some far more competitive teams today . It’s possible that those schools simply try harder and find more scholarly candidates for their o-line. But I somehow doubt that.

*Correction March 28, 2014: This story originally stated that the essay Willingham displayed was assigned in one of UNC’s “paper courses.” On Friday she clarified on Twitter that it was actually written for a standard introductory course, which may in fact be even more dispiriting.

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The Real Rosa Parks Story Is Better Than the Fairy Tale

The way we talk about her covers up uncomfortable truths about American racism.

By Jeanne Theoharis

Dr. Theoharis is a professor of political science and the author of eleven books on the civil rights and Black Power movements including “The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks” and “ The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks Young Readers’ Edition ,” co-adapted with Brandy Colbert.

Mug shot No. 7053 is one of the most iconic images of Rosa Parks. But the photo, often seen in museums and textbooks and on T-shirts and websites, isn’t what it seems. Though it’s regularly misattributed as such, it is not the mug shot taken at the time of Mrs. Parks’s arrest in Montgomery, Ala., on Dec. 1, 1955, after she famously refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white passenger. It was, in fact, taken when she was arrested in February 1956 after she and 88 other “boycott leaders” were indicted by the city in an attempt to end the boycott. The confusion around the image reveals Americans’ overconfidence in what we think we know about Mrs. Parks and about the civil rights movement.

Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks dominate the Civil Rights Movement chapters of elementary and high school textbooks and Black History Month celebrations. And yet much of what people learn about Mrs. Parks is narrow, distorted, or just plain wrong. In our collective understanding, she’s trapped in a single moment on a long-ago Montgomery bus, too often cast as meek, tired, quiet and middle class. The boycott is seen as a natural outgrowth of her bus stand. It’s inevitable, respectable and not disruptive.

But that’s not who she was, and it’s not how change actually works. “Over the years, I have been rebelling against second-class citizenship. It didn’t begin when I was arrested,” Mrs. Parks reminded interviewers time and again.

Born Feb. 4, 1913, she had been an activist for two decades before her bus stand — beginning with her work alongside Raymond Parks in 1931, whom she married the following year, to organize in defense of the “ Scottsboro Boys ” (nine Black teenagers who were falsely accused of raping two white women). Indeed, one of the issues that animated her six decades of activism was the injustice of the criminal justice system — wrongful accusations against Black men, disregard for Black women who had been sexually assaulted, and police brutality. With a small group of other activists, including E.D. Nixon, who would become branch president, she spent the decade before her well-known bus stand working to transform the Montgomery NAACP into a more activist chapter that focused on voter registration, criminal justice and desegregation. This was dangerous, tiring work and Mrs. Parks said it was “very difficult to keep going when all our work seemed to be in vain.” But she persevered.

Dispirited by the lack of change and what she called the “complacency” of many peers, she reformed the NAACP Youth Council in 1954 and urged her young charges to take greater stands against segregation. When 15-year-old Claudette Colvin was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a bus in March 1955, many Black Montgomerians were outraged by Ms. Colvin’s arrest, but some came to decide that the teenager was too feisty and emotional, and not the right test case. Mrs. Parks encouraged the young woman’s membership in the Youth Council and was the only adult leader, according to Ms. Colvin, to stay in touch with her the summer after her arrest. Mrs. Parks put her hope in the spirit and militancy of young people.

The day Mrs. Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus, she challenged the police officers arresting her: “Why do you push us around?” There are no photos from the arrest — no sense this would be a history-changing moment. But networks that had been built over years sprang into action late that night when Mrs. Parks decided to pursue her legal case and called Fred Gray, a young lawyer and fellow NAACP member, to represent her. Mr. Gray called the head of the Women’s Political Council, Jo Ann Robinson, who decided to call for a one-day boycott on Monday, the day Mrs. Parks would be arraigned in court.

Braving danger, Ms. Robinson left her home in the middle of the night to run off 50,000 leaflets with the help of a colleague and two trusted students. In the early-morning hours, the women of the W.P.C. fanned out across the city, leaving the leaflets in churches, barbershops and schools. Mr. Nixon began calling the more political ministers to get them on board. Buoyed by the boycott’s success that first day, the community decided to continue. The boycott succeeded in part because the Black community organized a massive car pool system , setting up some 40 pickup stations across town, serving about 30,000 riders a day, and in part because of a federal legal case challenging Montgomery’s bus segregation that Mr. Gray filed in February with courageous teenagers, Ms. Colvin and Mary Louise Smith, serving as two of the four plaintiffs.

The boycott seriously disrupted city life and bus company revenues. The police harassed the car pools mercilessly, giving out hundreds of tickets — and then, when that didn’t work, the city dredged up an old anti-syndicalism law and indicted 89 boycott leaders. Refusing to be cowed or to wait to be arrested, Mrs. Parks, along with others, presented herself to the police while scores of community members gathered outside. Mug shot No. 7053.

The Rosa Parks fable also erases the tremendous cost of her bus stand and the decade of suffering that ensued for the Parks family. They weren’t well-off. The Parkses lived in the Cleveland Court projects, Mrs. Parks’s husband, Raymond, working as a barber at Maxwell Air Force Base and Mrs. Parks spending her days in a stuffy back room at Montgomery Fair department store altering white men’s suits. Five weeks after her bus stand, she lost her job; then Raymond lost his. Receiving regular death threats, they never found steady work in Montgomery again. Eight months after the boycott’s successful end, the Parks family was forced to leave Montgomery for Detroit, where her brother and cousins lived. They continued to struggle to find work, and she was hospitalized to treat ulcers in 1959, which led to a bill she couldn’t pay. It was not until 1966, 11 years after her bus arrest, after she was hired to work in U.S. Representative John Conyers’s new Detroit office, that the Parks family registered an income comparable to what they’d made in 1955. (Mrs. Parks had supported Mr. Conyers’s long-shot bid for Congress in 1964.)

Mrs. Parks spent the next several decades of her life fighting the racism of the North — “the Northern promised land that wasn’t,” she called it — marching and organizing against housing discrimination, school segregation, employment discrimination and police brutality. In July 1967, on the fourth day of the Detroit uprising, police killed three Black teenagers at the Algiers Motel. Justice against the officers proved elusive (ultimately none of them were punished for murder or conspiracy) and Detroit’s newspapers grew reluctant to press the issue. At the request of young Black Power activists who refused to let these deaths go unmarked and the police misconduct be swept under the rug, Mrs. Parks agreed to serve as a juror on the “People’s Tribunal” to make the facts of the case known.

“I don’t believe in gradualism,” she made clear , “or that whatever is to be done for the better should take forever to do.” In the 1960s and ’70s, she was part of a growing Black Power movement in the city and across the country. Describing Malcolm X as her personal hero, she attended the 1968 Black Power convention in Philadelphia in 1968 and the 1972 Gary Convention , worked for reparations and against the war in Vietnam, served on prisoner defense committees, and visited the Black Panthers’ school in 1980. “Freedom fighters never retire,” she observed at a testimonial for a friend — and she never did.

But this Rosa Parks is not the one most of us learned about in school or hear about during Black History Month commemorations. Instead, we partake in an American myth, as President George W. Bush put it after her death in 2005, that “one candle can light the darkness.” A simple seamstress changes the course of history with a single act, decent people did the right thing and the nation inexorably moved toward justice. Mrs. Parks’s decades of work challenging racial injustice puts the lie to this narrative. The nation didn’t move naturally toward justice. It had to be pushed.

The boycott was a tremendous feat of organization that drew on networks built over years. Understanding the demonization, death threats and economic hardship Mrs. Parks endured for more than a decade underscores the costs of such heroism. Most Americans did not support the civil rights movement when it was happening; in a Gallup poll right before the March on Washington in 1963, only 23 percent of Americans who were familiar with the proposed march felt favorably toward it.

Reckoning with the fact that Mrs. Parks spent the second half of her life fighting the racism of the North demonstrates that racism was not some regional anachronism but a national cancer. And seeing how she placed her greatest hope in the militant spirit of young people (finding many adults “complacent”) gives the lie to the ways commentators today have used the civil rights movement to chastise Black Lives Matter for not going about change the right way. Learning about the real Rosa Parks reveals how false those distinctions are, how criminal justice was key to her freedom dreams, how disruptive and persevering the movement, and where she would be standing today — an essential lesson young people , and indeed all Americans, need to understand to grapple honestly with this country’s history and see the road forward.

Jeanne Theoharis is a professor of political science and the author of eleven books on the civil rights and Black Power movements including “The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks” and “ The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks Young Readers’ Edition ,” co-adapted with Brandy Colbert.

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Who was Rosa Parks, and what did she do in the fight for racial equality?

Professor of American History, University of Sussex

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Rosa Parks has gone down in history as an ordinary, elderly black woman who spontaneously kick-started the modern African American civil rights movement. It all began in December 1955, when Parks was arrested for civil disobedience: she had refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a crowded bus in the racially segregated town of Montgomery, Alabama. Her defiance sparked the push for racial equality, which brought civil rights superstars such as Martin Luther King Jr into the public eye, and changed the world forever.

Or so the story goes. The truth – as is so often the case – is actually far more complicated.

In fact, Rosa Parks was just 42 years old when she took that famous ride on a City Lines bus in Montgomery – a town known for being the first capital of the pro-slavery Confederacy during the American Civil War. Parks – a seamstress at a downtown department store – had a history as a civil rights campaigner, having served as a youth organiser for the local branch of America’s oldest and most effective civil rights organisation, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). She had also attended the controversial Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, where a number of African Americans were trained in protest methods by labour radicals.

Seizing the moment

Parks’ protest did not come out of the blue. In 1954, the US Supreme Court verdict in the case of Brown v Board of Education signalled federal opposition to racial segregation. The court ruled that segregated public schools deprived African Americans of their entitlement to “equal protection of the laws”. And black leaders in Montgomery – including labour activists, NAACP members, and middle-class members of the Women’s Political Committee – had been campaigning for better treatment for black people on the local buses for several years.

Parks’ refusal to give up her seat, and her subsequent arrest, seemed to offer these campaigners with the chance they had been looking for: to test the state’s bus segregation laws in the federal courts.

As soon as they heard of Parks’ arrest, Women’s Political Committee leader Jo Ann Robinson and veteran trade unionist E. D. Nixon set about mobilising a community-wide boycott of the buses. Under the leadership of a charismatic, but previously unknown preacher named Martin Luther King Jr, the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) spearheaded the year-long boycott that captured the attention of the world and heaped pressure on the city’s white authorities to respond to black demands.

Initially, the MIA used the African American response to Rosa Parks’ arrest to campaign for better treatment of blacks on the segregated buses. But the NAACP wanted more – it offered legal assistance to the MIA, on condition that the organisation fight for full integration.

To avoid legal complications relating to Parks’ arraignment, she was not made a plaintiff in the case of Browder v Gayle , which challenged Alabama’s segregation laws. In November 1956, the US Supreme Court issued a brief and narrow ruling that, in the wake of the Brown decision, racial segregation on private buses in Montgomery was unlawful under the Fourteenth Amendment.

A false dawn

This judicial success proved to be a false dawn for the civil rights movement in the United States. Martin Luther King and other prominent activists soon found that the Eisenhower administration had no intention of attacking racial segregation in the South with genuine vigour. Not until February 1960, when a group of black college students in Greensboro, North Carolina, initiated the first of what proved to be a rash of “ sit-ins ” in segregated stores, did the movement really gain momentum .

The nonviolent direct action protests that followed in cities such as Birmingham and Selma would eventually bring African Americans in the South an unprecedented degree of political and social power. The US civil rights movement also had a significant impact on racial protest in other parts of the world.

In Australia, students from the University of Sydney undertook their own “ freedom ride ” in 1965 to expose racism against the country’s indigenous inhabitants. Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, it was an inspiration for the Bristol bus boycott of 1963 and the Northern Ireland civil rights demonstrations later in the decade.

Rosa Parks died in 2005. She earned her place in history, alongside hundreds of other brave men and women who helped end racial segregation by statute. Even today, the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States – sparked by the unlawful police killing of African Americans – demonstrates that the activist spirit unleashed in Montgomery in 1955 lives on.

• US Supreme Court
• Racial discrimination
• Civil rights movement
• Martin Luther King, Jr. (MLK)
• Johns Hopkins University Press

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This ridiculous one-paragraph essay by a unc athlete got an a-minus [update].

UPDATE: The whistleblower who showed the essay to ESPN, Mary Willingham, says the student got an A- in the class , not necessarily an A- on the paper. Willingham says she doesn't know what the student got on the essay, or if the student made any additional edits before handing it in.

ORIGINAL POST:

In January the University of North Carolina publicly apologized for offering "phony classes" designed to keep athletes academically eligible since the 1990s.

In an ESPN report , ex-UNC football player Deunta Williams and whistleblower Mary Willingham detailed how these "paper classes" worked.

The classes — which were listed as "independent studies" on the course book — had no attendance, and students got credit for writing papers that always got either A's or B's.

Willingham, who called the paper classes "scam classes," showed ESPN an example of one of these papers. It's a one-paragraph, 148-word "final paper" on Rosa Parks.

The essay, titled "Rosa Parks: My Story" got an A-minus, Willingham says.

Here's the text ( h/t @BrianAGraham) :

On the evening of December Rosa Parks decided that she was going to sit in the white people section on the bus in Montgomery, Alabama. During this time blacks had to give up there seats to whites when more whites got on the bus. Rosa parks refused to give up her seat. Her and the bus driver began to talk and the conversation went like this. "Let me have those front seats" said the driver. She didn't get up and told the driver that she was tired of giving her seat to white people. "I'm going to have you arrested," said the driver. "You may do that," Rosa Parks responded. Two white policemen came in and Rosa Parks asked them "why do you all push us around?" The police officer replied and said "I don't know, but the law is the law and you're under arrest."

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'rosa parks: in her own words' reveals the real person behind the icon.

The Alabama woman's civil rights activism did not begin or end with her famous refusal to move to the back of a bus in segregated Montgomery, a...

Rosa Parks is best remembered as the African American woman who refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man. It was 1955 in the segregated South and the start of the Montgomery bus boycott.

That moment made her the face of the civil rights movement — but there was much more to her than that single act of defiance.

As a young girl in Alabama in the 1920s, Parks often stayed up all night, helping her grandfather Sylvester Edwards keep watch. In the years after World War I, the Ku Klux Klan rode throughout black communities, terrorizing families, burning churches and homes.

The two wanted to be prepared, so her grandfather "always had his shotgun within hand's reach," Parks wrote when she was 6 or 7. "I wanted to see him kill a Ku-Kluxer. He declared the first to invade our home would surely die."

This handwritten note is among the documents, photos and heirlooms such as her family's Bible now on display in Rosa Parks: In Her Own Words . The new exhibit at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., aims to reveal the real person behind the civil rights icon known by many only as a demure seamstress.

"She was a radical. She maintained a calm demeanor," says Adrienne Cannon, the exhibit's curator. "But beneath the surface was always that militant spirit, and that buoyed her, and that guided her throughout her life."

Parks was "feisty," says Carla Hayden, the 14th librarian of Congress. "It becomes clear as you walk through the exhibit that her family were feisty people. These were not folks who sit by and let things happen to them."

In fact, Hayden points out, in the 1950s, in the segregated South and with the threat of physical harm, it took immense courage to fight publicly for civil rights.

"At that point, you get a sense that she was making a conscious decision, that she was going to do what she could to help others. And she was going to take the risk," Hayden says.

On Dec. 1, 1955, 42-year-old Parks boarded a bus in Montgomery, Ala., and stayed seated when she was told move to the back of the vehicle.

"I had been pushed around all my life," she wrote later, reflecting on the incident, "and felt at this moment that I couldn't take it anymore."

She was arrested on charges of civil disobedience. At the Library of Congress exhibit, her arrest record and fingerprints are interspersed between her handwritten notes.

"I sat in a little room with bars before I was moved to a cell with two other women," she remembered. "I felt that I had been deserted, but I did not cry."

Political buttons, brochures and photographs in the exhibit show how the civil rights movement rallied around Parks as she faced consequences from her arrest.

"People have a view of Rosa Parks as this very sedate woman with a purse. And that's the iconic image, and she was just tired," says Hayden, referring to the common explanation given for why Parks did not move.

"What this exhibit does is show you that there was so much more to Rosa Parks — in terms of her belief in civil rights, her determination and also the hardships that she endured because of that."

Parks' commitment to the civil rights movement continued throughout her life. She spoke at NAACP meetings around the country and stayed involved in civil rights cases on a national level. As photos from the exhibit show, she struck close friendships with prominent activists such as Angela Davis and Stokely Carmichael. In 1995, at age 82, she spoke at the Million Man March. Parks died a decade later, in 2005.

"She was active politically and she was right up to the minute," Hayden says. "Rosa Parks kept her hand in the game a little bit."

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Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Montgomery Bus Boycott

Written by: Stewart Burns, Union Institute & University

By the end of this section, you will:.

• Explain how and why various groups responded to calls for the expansion of civil rights from 1960 to 1980

Suggested Sequencing

Use this narrative with the Jackie Robinson Narrative, The Little Rock Nine Narrative, The Murder of Emmett Till Narrative, and the Rosa Parks’s Account of the Montgomery Bus Boycott (Radio Interview), April 1956 Primary Source to discuss the rise of the African American civil rights movement pre-1960.

Rosa Parks launched the Montgomery bus boycott when she refused to give up her bus seat to a white man. The boycott proved to be one of the pivotal moments of the emerging civil rights movement. For 13 months, starting in December 1955, the black citizens of Montgomery protested nonviolently with the goal of desegregating the city’s public buses. By November 1956, the Supreme Court had banned the segregated transportation legalized in 1896 by the Plessy v. Ferguson ruling. Montgomery’s boycott was not entirely spontaneous, and Rosa Parks and other activists had prepared to challenge segregation long in advance.

On December 1, 1955, a tired Rosa L. Parks left the department store where she worked as a tailor’s assistant and boarded a crowded city bus for the ride home. She sat down between the “whites only” section in the front and the “colored” section in the back. Black riders were to sit in this middle area only if the back was filled. When a white man boarded, the bus driver ordered four African American passengers to stand so the white passenger could sit. The other riders reluctantly got up, but Parks refused. She knew she was not violating the segregation law, because there were no vacant seats. The police nevertheless arrived and took her to jail.

Parks had not planned her protest, but she was a civil rights activist well trained in civil disobedience so she remained calm and resolute. Other African American women had challenged the community’s segregation statutes in the past several months, but her cup of forbearance had run over. “I had almost a life history of being rebellious against being mistreated because of my color,” Parks recalled. On this occasion more than others “I felt that I was not being treated right and that I had a right to retain the seat that I had taken.” She was fighting for her natural and constitutional rights when she protested against the treatment that stripped away her dignity. “When I had been pushed as far as I could stand to be pushed. I had decided that I would have to know once and for all what rights I had as a human being and a citizen.” She was attempting to “bring about freedom from this kind of thing.”

Perhaps the incident was not as spontaneous as it appeared, however. Parks was an active participant in the civil rights movement for several years and had served as secretary of both the Montgomery and Alabama state NAACP. She founded the youth council of the local NAACP and trained the young people in civil rights activism. She had even discussed challenging the segregated bus system with the youth council before 15-year-old Claudette Colvin was arrested for refusing to give up her seat the previous March. Ill treatment on segregated city buses had festered into the most acute problem in the black community in Montgomery. Segregated buses were part of a system that inflicted Jim Crow segregation upon African Americans.

In 1949, a group of professional black women and men had formed the Women’s Political Council (WPC) of Montgomery. They were dedicated to organizing African Americans to demand equality and civil rights by seeking to change Jim Crow segregation in public transportation. In May 1954, WPC president Jo Ann Robinson informed the mayor that African Americans in the city were considering launching a boycott.

The WPC converted abuse on buses into a glaring public issue, and the group collaborated with the NAACP and other civil rights organizations to challenge segregation there. Parks was bailed out of jail by local NAACP leader, E. D. Nixon, who was accompanied by two liberal whites, attorney Clifford Durr and his wife Virginia Foster Durr, leader of the anti-segregation Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF). Virginia Durr had become close friends with Parks. In fact, she helped fund Parks’s attendance at a workshop for two weeks on desegregating schools only a few months before.

The Durrs and Nixon had worked with Parks to plot a strategy for challenging the constitutionality of segregation on Montgomery buses. After Parks’s arrest, Robinson agreed with them and thought the time was ripe for the planned boycott. She worked with two of her students, staying up all night mimeographing flyers announcing a one-day bus boycott for Monday, December 5.

Because of ministers’ leadership in the vibrant African American churches in the city, Nixon called on the ministers to win their support for the boycott. Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., a young and relatively unknown minister of the middle-class Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, was unsure about the timing but offered assistance. Baptist minister Ralph Abernathy eagerly supported the boycott.

On December 5, African Americans boycotted the buses. They walked to work, carpooled, and took taxis as a measure of solidarity. Parks was convicted of violating the segregation law and charged a $14 fine. Because of the success of the boycott, black leaders formed the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) to continue the protest and surprisingly elected Reverend King president.

Rosa Parks, with Martin Luther King Jr. in the background, is pictured here soon after the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

After earning his PhD at Boston University’s School of Theology, King had returned to the Deep South with his new bride, Coretta Scott, a college-educated, rural Alabama native. On the night of December 5, 1955, the 26-year-old pastor presided over the first MIA mass meeting, in a supercharged atmosphere of black spirituality. Participants felt the Holy Spirit was alive that night with a palpable power that transfixed. When King rose to speak, unscripted words burst out of him, a Lincoln-like synthesis of the rational and emotional, the secular and sacred. The congregants must protest, he said, because both their divinity and their democracy required it. They would be honored by future generations for their moral courage.

The participants wanted to continue the protest until their demands for fairer treatment were met as well as establishment of a first-come, first-served seating system that kept reserved sections. White leaders predicted that the boycott would soon come to an end because blacks would lose enthusiasm and accept the status quo. When blacks persisted, some of the whites in the community formed the White Citizens’ Council, an opposition movement committed to preserving white supremacy.

The bus boycott continued and was supported by almost all of Montgomery’s 42,000 black residents. The women of the MIA created a complex carpool system that got black citizens to work and school. By late December, city commissioners were concerned about the effects of the boycott on business and initiated talks to try to resolve the dispute. The bus company (which now supported integrated seating) feared it might go bankrupt and urged compromise. However, the commissioners refused to grant any concessions and the negotiations broke down over the next few weeks. The commissioners adopted a “get tough” policy when it became clear that the boycott would continue. Police harassed carpool drivers. They arrested and jailed King on a petty speeding charge when he was helping out one day. Angry whites tried to terrorize him and bombed his house with his wife and infant daughter inside, but no one was injured. Drawing from the Sermon on the Mount, the pastor persuaded an angry crowd to put their guns away and go home, preventing a bloody riot. Nixon’s home and Abernathy’s church were also bombed.

On January 30, MIA leaders challenged the constitutionality of bus segregation because the city refused their moderate demands. Civil rights attorney Fred Gray knew that a state case would be unproductive and filed a federal lawsuit. Meanwhile, city leaders went on the offensive and indicted nearly 100 boycott leaders, including King, on conspiracy charges. King’s trial and conviction in March 1956 elicited negative national publicity for the city on television and in newspapers. Sympathetic observers sent funds to Montgomery to support the movement.

In June 1956, the Montgomery federal court ruled in Browder v. Gayle that Alabama’s bus segregation laws violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equality and were unconstitutional. The Supreme Court upheld the decision in November. In the wake of the court victories, MIA members voted to end the boycott. Black citizens triumphantly rode desegregated Montgomery’s buses on December 21, 1956.

A diagram of the Montgomery bus where Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat was used in court to ultimately strike down segregation on the city’s buses.

The Montgomery bus boycott made King a national civil rights leader and charismatic symbol of black equality. Other black ministers and activists like Abernathy, Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, Bayard Rustin, and Ella Baker also became prominent figures in the civil rights movement. The ministers formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to protest white supremacy and work for voting rights throughout the South, testifying to the importance of black churches and ministers as a vital element of the civil rights movement.

The Montgomery bus boycott paved the way for the civil rights movement to demand freedom and equality for African Americans and transformed American politics, culture, and society by helping create the strategies, support networks, leadership, vision, and spiritual direction of the movement. It demonstrated that ordinary African American citizens could band together at the local level to demand and win in their struggle for equal rights and dignity. The Montgomery experience laid the foundations for the next decade of a nonviolent direct-action movement for equal civil rights for African Americans.

Review Questions

1. All of the following are true of Rosa Parks except

• she served as secretary of the Montgomery NAACP
• she trained young people in civil rights activism
• she unintentionally challenged the bus segregation laws of Montgomery
• she was well-trained in civil disobedience

2. The initial demand of those who boycotted the Montgomery Bus System was for the city to

• hire more black bus drivers in Montgomery
• arrest abusive bus drivers
• remove the city commissioners
• modify Jim Crow laws in public transportation

3. The Montgomery Improvement Association was formed in 1955 primarily to

• bring a quick end to the bus boycott
• maintain segregationist policies on public buses
• provide carpool assistance to the boycotters
• organize the bus protest

4. As a result of the successful Montgomery Bus Boycott, Martin Luther King Jr. was

• elected mayor of Montgomery
• targeted as a terrorist and held in jail for the duration of the boycott
• recognized as a new national voice for African American civil rights
• made head pastor of his church

5. The Federal court case Browder v. Gayle established that

• the principles in Brown v. Board of Education were also relevant in the Montgomery Bus Boycott
• the Montgomery bus segregation laws were a violation of the constitutional guarantee of equality
• the principles of Plessy v. Ferguson were similar to those in the Montgomery bus company
• the conviction of Martin Luther King Jr. was unconstitutional

6. All the following resulted from the Montgomery bus boycott except

• the formation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)
• the emergence of Martin Luther King Jr. as a national leader
• the immediate end of Jim Crow laws in Alabama
• negative national publicity for the city of Montgomery

Free Response Questions

• Explain how the Montgomery Bus Boycott affected the civil rights movement.
• Describe how the Montgomery Bus Boycott propelled Martin Luther King Jr. to national notice.

AP Practice Questions

Rosa Parks being fingerprinted by Deputy Sheriff D. H. Lackey after her arrest in December 1955.

1. Which of the following had the most immediate impact on events in the photograph?

• The integration of the U.S. military
• The Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson
• The Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education
• The integration of Little Rock (AR) Central High School

2. The actions leading to the provided photograph were similar to those associated with

• the labor movement in the 1920s
• the women’s suffrage movement in the early twentieth century
• the work of abolitionists in the 1850s
• the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s

3. The situation depicted in the provided photograph contributed most directly to the

• economic development of the South
• growth of the suburbs
• growth of the civil right movement
• evolution of the anti-war movement

Primary Sources

Burns, Steward, ed. Daybreak of Freedom: The Montgomery Bus Boycott. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

Garrow, David J, ed. Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It: The Memoir of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson . Nashville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1987.

Greenlee, Marcia M. “Interview with Rosa McCauley Parks.” August 22-23, 1978, Detroit. Cambridge, MA: Black Women Oral History Project, Harvard University. https://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/manifests/view/drs:45175350$14i

Suggested Resources

Branch, Taylor. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63 . New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988.

Brinkley, Douglas. Rosa Parks . New York: Penguin, 2000.

Rosa Parks Museum, Montgomery, AL. www.troy.edu/rosaparks

Williams, Juan. Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965 . New York: Penguin, 2013.

Related Content

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness

In our resource history is presented through a series of narratives, primary sources, and point-counterpoint debates that invites students to participate in the ongoing conversation about the American experiment.

Home — Essay Samples — History — Rosa Parks — A Report on Rosa Parks

A Report on Rosa Parks

• Categories: Civil Rights Movement Rosa Parks

About this sample

Words: 1312 |

Published: Mar 1, 2019

Words: 1312 | Pages: 3 | 7 min read

Who Was Rosa Parks?

Works cited.

• Brinkley, D. (2000). Rosa Parks: A life. Penguin.
• Collier-Thomas, B., & Franklin, V. P. (2001). Sisters in the struggle: African American women in the civil rights-black power movement. NYU Press.
• Crowe, C. M. (1992). A bus of our own: Women and the Montgomery Bus Boycott. University of Kentucky Press.
• Haskins, J. (1997). Rosa Parks: My story. Dial Books.
• McAfee, C. L. (2013). Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott. ABDO Publishing.
• Morris, A. (1999). The origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black communities organizing for change. Free Press.
• Parks, R., & Haskins, J. (1992). Rosa Parks: My story. Puffin Books.
• Ransby, B. (2003). Ella Baker and the Black freedom movement: A radical democratic vision. University of North Carolina Press.
• Theoharis, J. (2013). The rebellious life of Mrs. Rosa Parks. Beacon Press.
• Zinn, H. (2003). A people's history of the United States. Harper Perennial.

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Rosa Parks (1913-2005)

This photo is of Parks at 43, a year after she refused to move from her seat. Dubbed "the mother of the civil rights movement", Parks was born in Tuskegee, Alabama. Parks' husband, Raymond Parks was also a activist against racial injustice, and together they worked with many social justice organizations, such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Parks was also a seamstress, however her actions led to her losing her job. But, her stubborness inspired the Montgomory Bus Boycott. Parks remained active in civil rights after her arrest such as through the March on Washington of Jobs and Freedom in 1963, Mississippi Freedom Project in 1964.

For more on Rosa Parks go to:

https://www.nps.gov/features/malu/feat0002/wof/rosa_parks.htm

https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/rosa-parks

https://www.loc.gov/collections/rosa-parks-papers/about-this-collection/

Rosa Parks, November 1956. 1956. Photograph Print. Library of Congress: Prints and Photographs Divison. https://www.loc.gov/item/2015645700/ (Accessed December 5, 2018)

https://www.loc.gov/item/2015645700/

Public Domain

Public Domain is a copyright term that is often used when talking about copyright for creative works. Under U.S. copyright law, individual items that are in the public domain are items that are no longer protected by copyright law. This means that you do not need to request permission to re-use, re-publish or even change a copy of the item. Items enter the public domain under U.S. copyright law for a number of reasons: the original copyright may have expired; the item was created by the U.S. Federal Government or other governmental entity that views the things it creates as in the public domain; the work was never protected by copyright for some other reason related to how it was produced (for example, it was a speech that wasn't written down or recorded); or the work doesn't have enough originality to make it eligible for copyright protection.

A UNC Athlete Got An A-Minus In A Fake 'Paper Class' With This Ridiculous One-Paragraph Final Essay

A new report released Wednesday details how the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill offered "paper classes" — courses that never met and required only one final paper — to help boost athletes' grades and keep them eligible.

In an ESPN report  in March , ex-UNC football player Deunta Williams and whistleblower Mary Willingham detailed how these paper classes worked.

The classes, which were listed as "independent studies" in the course book, had no attendance, and students got credit for writing papers that always got either A's or B's.

Willingham, who called the paper classes "scam classes," showed ESPN an example of one of these papers. It's a one-paragraph, 146-word "final paper" on Rosa Parks.

Related stories

The student received an A- overall in the course , Willingham says.

Here's the text ( h/t @BrianAGraham) :

On the evening of December Rosa Parks decided that she was going to sit in the white people section on the bus in Montgomery, Alabama. During this time blacks had to give up there seats to whites when more whites got on the bus. Rosa parks refused to give up her seat. Her and the bus driver began to talk and the conversation went like this. "Let me have those front seats" said the driver. She didn't get up and told the driver that she was tired of giving her seat to white people. "I'm going to have you arrested," said the driver. "You may do that," Rosa Parks responded. Two white policemen came in and Rosa Parks asked them "why do you all push us around?" The police officer replied and said "I don't know, but the law is the law and you're under arrest.

While a previous investigation cleared the UNC athletics department from wrongdoing in the scandal, Wednesday's report " found a new culprit: the Academic Support Program for Student-Athletes  ... The report describes a fairly broad group of academic and athletic officials who knew about athletes getting better grades in classes that only required papers, yet taking little or no action," a ccording to The News & Observer.

The student newspaper The Daily Tar Heel  noted that the new report "found clear evidence that academic counselors from the football, men's basketball and women's basketball teams asked for players to be enrolled in bogus independent study classes in order for them to be eligible."

The more recent investigation was led by Kenneth Wainstein, a former US Justice Department official. Wainstein reportedly had an unprecedented level of access to material related to the UNC scandal, as well as the cooperation of former African studies chairman Julius Nyang'oro and department administrator Deborah Crowder.

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J eanne T heoharis . The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks .

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Katherine Mellen Charron, J eanne T heoharis . The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks ., The American Historical Review , Volume 119, Issue 2, April 2014, Pages 564–565, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/119.2.564

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In too many ways, Rosa Parks has always been “hidden in plain sight” (p. 206). This is the central theme of Jeanne Theoharis's biography, which should forever put to rest the misperception that this formidable activist was merely too tired after a long day's work to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus. Chronicling her subject's self-described “life history of being rebellious” (p. xv), Theoharis offers an in-depth exploration of the gap—as well as its political usefulness—between Parks the icon and Parks the radical “race woman.” Only by understanding Parks's lifelong political commitments, she insists, can we discern that her “combination of steadfastness and outrage, tenacity and courage is what deserves national veneration” (p. 244).

Theoharis declares that hers is “fundamentally a political biography” and that she aims to tell “a different story” that speaks to “broader truths about race in America” (p. xv). To do so, she organizes the book into three parts. The first two chapters narrate Parks's coming of age and activism prior to December 1, 1955. Theoharis ably locates Parks's liberationist politics in the everyday experience of southern black working-class community life and sharpens readers' sense of both the uncertainty and the risks that accompanied her political organizing. Chapters three through five reexamine the boycott, paying particular attention to its gender and class politics. Theoharis explains how the mythic Parks took shape in the earliest days of the protest itself, noting that in a Cold War context “the success of Parks as the symbol of the boycott turned, in part, on obscuring her long-standing political activity” (p. 83). She also provides an unprecedented focus on the costs—physical, psychological, and economic—of Parks's activism and its impact on her family. It did not matter how much practical experience, organizing acumen, or respect Parks had accumulated; she could find no work due to gender and class prejudice within the black community. To local leaders, the real Rosa Parks was even then “hidden in plain sight.” That invisibility, coupled with the failure to acknowledge the trauma so many activists underwent, has a larger salience for how our nation commemorates the freedom struggle. “To see the Parks family suffering … mars the legend,” Theoharis reminds us (p. 117). The family relocated to Detroit in 1957, and the final two chapters cover the last forty-eight years of Parks's life, positioning her in relation to many activist communities primarily in the black power era.

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