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Learning From Rosa Parks on Transit Equity Day

By staff - People's Transit Alliance, February 6, 2023

This past Saturday, Feb. 4th, 2023, was Transit Equity Day, “a collaborative effort of several organizations and unions to promote public transit as a civil right and a strategy to combat climate change…” organized by Labor 4 Sustainability.

For Transit Equity Day 2023, the People’s Transit Alliance held a canvass of transit riders in Downtown Berkeley to discuss what improvements could be made to the bus system, the planned service redesign, and the importance of transit workers and riders building power together.

Labor 4 Sustainability chose Feb. 4th, Rosa Parks’ birthday, in order to honor her legacy as a civil rights icon, and her courageous action taken on a segregated bus on December 1, 1955. Those of us raised in the United States know the story of Rosa Parks, and her refusal to give up her seat to a white passenger.

What is less well known is her long history as an organizer for the NAACP, her radical politics, and her lifelong commitment to fighting white supremacy in the United States. 

The People’s Transit Alliance wishes to share this neglected side of Rosa Parks’ story. As we organize in her name, we must disrupt the whitewashed version of her life that is taught in schools, and used by politicians and corporations to maintain the very systems of oppression that she spent her life fighting against.

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