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Just two weeks before Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat a local NAACP worker had been murdered, so she was certainly a very brave woman. Yet there is some injustice that she became a cultural icon while it is hard to even find out the names of the three other black women arrested in Montgomery for the same offense during the year before Rosa Parks was arrested.
We might now be remembering the then fifteen-year-old Claudette Colvin, were it not that she was ultimately found guilty only on an assault charge (for struggling during her arrest), because the local powers-that-be had not wanted to get into a constitutional argument just a few months before Parks' arrest. And although the NAACP did defend Colvin in court, they did not make her the focus of a larger campaign because they knew that Montgomery's church-going negroes would not rally behind an unwed, teenage mother who regularly used bad language. Rosa Parks however was a respectable married woman who had done voluntary work for the NAACP for years and was secretary to the leader of the local chapter. She therefore made an ideal rallying point for the activities which followed her arrest.
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