Rosa Parks

February 4, 1913 – October 24, 2005

"Mother of the Civil Rights Movement" who refused to give up her bus seat.

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Rosa Louise McCauley Parks was born on February 4, 1913, in Tuskegee, Alabama, and grew up in a segregated South where Jim Crow laws touched nearly every part of daily life. She attended a laboratory school run by the Alabama State Teachers College but had to leave to care for her ailing grandmother and mother. At nineteen she married Raymond Parks, a barber and civil-rights activist who encouraged her own growing commitment to the cause. Long before December 1955, Parks was a seasoned activist, not a bystander who happened onto history. In 1943 she joined the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP, serving for years as its secretary under chapter president E. D. Nixon and helping lead its youth council. She investigated cases of racial violence and injustice, and in the summer of 1955 she attended a workshop on school desegregation at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, a training ground for civil-rights organizers. She was also not the first to resist bus segregation in Montgomery. In March 1955, a fifteen-year-old named Claudette Colvin was arrested for refusing to give up her seat, but local leaders worried she was too young to anchor a legal challenge. When Parks made her own stand months later, she did so as a respected and strategically positioned member of the movement. On December 1, 1955, riding home from her job as a seamstress, Parks refused a bus driver's order to give up her seat so that a white passenger could sit. She was arrested for violating the city's segregation ordinance. She later rejected the popular idea that she simply had tired feet, explaining, 'I was not tired physically... No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.' Her act was a principled and courageous choice, not a mere accident of fatigue. Parks' arrest became the spark for the Montgomery Bus Boycott, a protest in which tens of thousands of Black residents refused to ride the city buses for more than a year. The boycott introduced the nation to a young minister, Martin Luther King Jr., and demonstrated the power of organized nonviolent action. Segregation on Montgomery's buses finally ended after the Supreme Court upheld the ruling in Browder v. Gayle in late 1956, building on the momentum of Brown v. Board of Education. The victory came at a cost. Parks lost her job and faced threats, and in 1957 she and Raymond moved to Detroit, Michigan. There she continued her activism and, from 1965 to 1988, worked in the office of Congressman John Conyers. She lived to see the March on Washington and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, landmark laws the movement she helped ignite made possible. Honored in her later years with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1996 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 1999, Rosa Parks became known as the 'mother of the civil rights movement.' When she died on October 24, 2005, at the age of ninety-two, she became the first woman ever to lie in honor in the Rotunda of the United States Capitol.

Rosa Parks

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