Rosa Parks

From ArticleWorld

Rosa Parks was a famous African American civil rights activist who refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger. Her arrest sparked the rise of the Civil Rights movement and the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

Personal History

On Feb. 4, 1913, Rosa Louis McCauley was born in Tuskegee, Alabama to James and Leona. Upon their separation, Parks and her younger brother Sylvester were raised by their mother in Pine Level, Alabama, near Montgomery. Parks was homeschooled until age eleven and then attended the Industrial School for Girls in Montgomery and the Alabama State Teachers College for Negroes. However, she dropped out before graduation to take care of her ailing grandmother and later mother. She later finished in degree in 1933.

Parks married Raymond Parks in 1932. Raymond Parks was a member of the National Associated for the Advancement of Colored People and advocate for the Scottsboro Boys, a group of nine black teenagers wrongly accused of raping two white women.

In 1943, Parks herself joined the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP and served as secretary Edgar Nixon, the group’s president.

Professionally, Parks worked as a hospital aide, seamstress, and housekeeper. Unable to find work after her arrest in 1955, Parks and her husband moved to Hampton, Virginia and later Detroit, Michigan, where Parks worked as secretary and receptionist for African-American U.S. Representative John Conyers. She worked for Conyers from 1965 till her retirement in 1988.

Parks was also a lifelong member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

Parks died in Detroit on Oct. 24, 2005.

Political Involvement

On Dec. 1, 1955, Parks boarded a bus in downtown Montgomery. After a three more stops, the bus filled with white passengers, and the bus driver demanded that the blacks sitting in the middle rows of the bus move further back to make room for the white passengers. Parks refused to move. The bus driver, James Black, called the police and Parks was arrested for civil disobedience.

Parks recalled the account in her autobiography, My Story: “People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”

Upon Parks conviction, local civil rights advocates organized and established the Montgomery Improvement Association. The MIA voted then-unknown Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as the organization’s president.

Parks was a member of the Board of Advocates of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and co-founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development.

Later in life, Parks received many honors and awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Congressional Gold Medal, the Rosa Parks Peace Prize, the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal, and induction into the Michigan Women’s Hall of Fame.