Rosa Parks, the noted American civil rights pioneer who died earlier this week, had a couple of indirect connections to Chattanooga.
In 1955, just a few months before she refused to give up her seat to a white man on the Montgomery, Ala., she passed through Chattanooga on her way to attend a civil rights training session at the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tenn. She wrote about visiting the Scenic City in her 1992 autobiography, Rosa Parks: My Story.
"I took a bus to Chattanooga, Tenn., where a white man picked me up and drove me about 50 miles to Monteagle, Tenn.," she wrote in the book. "I don't think we talked much, but I was not uncomfortable. I was used to white
people, and I accepted them as they accepted me."
She wrote that the training she received at Highlander helped prepare her for the events and long bus boycott that followed in Montgomery before the walls of segregation in the bus system were broken down.
She later returned to Highlander for further training, including at least
one session with the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
The school, which was criticized by some for its liberal views for the
time but praised by supporters as a catalyst for civil rights change in
the South, later closed in Monteagle. It eventually reopened outside
Knoxville in New Market, Tenn., and today is known as the Highlander
Research and Education Center.
Mrs. Parks' late husband, Raymond, was involved in the 1930s in finding a proper defense for the accused black rapists, the Scottsboro Boys, several of whom where from Chattanooga.
The alleged Scottsboro Boys' incident had occurred on March 25, 1931, when several black youths were accused of raping two white girls on a train
from Chattanooga to Huntsville, Ala. They were convicted but many blacks thought they had been wrongly convicted and were victims of racial
prejudice. Among those who worked hard on their behalf was Raymond Parks.
Many historians believe the Scottsboro case was the start of the modern civil rights movement.
Andrew and Leroy Wright, two of the four Chattanoogans accused in the case, are buried at Pleasant Gardens Cemetery by Missionary Ridge.