Rosa Parks (1913-2005),
African American civil rights activist. In 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, Parks
refused to give up her bus seat to a white man. Her action led to the Montgomery
bus boycott, an organized, citywide protest against segregation that used
nonviolent tactics. Rosa Parks’s personal act of defiance opened a decisive
chapter in the civil rights movement in the United States.
Rosa Louise McCauley was born in Tuskegee, Alabama. She
was raised by her mother, Leona McCauley, on her grandparents’ farm at Pine
Level, a small community outside Montgomery. Rosa received her primary education
in a segregated rural school. In 1924 she enrolled at the private Montgomery
Industrial School for Girls, known as 'Miss White's School' after its principal
and cofounder, Alice L. White. All the students were African Americans, and all
the teachers were white women from the North. 'What I learned best at Miss
White's school,” Parks later wrote in her autobiography, Rosa Parks: My
Story (1992), 'was that I was a person with dignity and self-respect, and I
should not set my sights lower than anybody else just because I was black.'
As a teenager she attended Booker T. Washington Junior
High School in Montgomery and participated in a high school program at State
Teachers College (now Alabama State University). She dropped out at the age of
16 to care for her grandmother, who died soon after, and then for her ailing
mother. In December 1932 she married Raymond Parks, a 29-year-old barber. Rosa
Parks received her high school diploma the following year and helped support the
family by sewing and doing other jobs.
Parks’s husband had long been active in the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), an organization
founded to improve the conditions for blacks in the United States. Parks became
increasingly committed to racial justice as she and her husband joined the
campaign to save the 'Scottsboro Boys'—nine young black men who were accused of
raping two white teenagers near Scottsboro, Alabama, in 1931. An all-white jury
convicted the nine boys of the crime and sentenced eight of them to death,
despite strong evidence of their innocence. All of the Scottsboro Boys
eventually gained their freedom, but the process took nearly 20 years. See
Scottsboro Case.
In 1943 Rosa Parks became secretary of the Montgomery
branch of the NAACP. That year, she made her first attempt to register to vote,
although she did not succeed until her third try, in 1945. She also had her
first dispute with a local bus driver when she tried to defy a rule that
required blacks to board buses from the back door.
A turning point in her life and in the history of the
struggle for racial equality occurred on December 1, 1955. Parks was riding home
from work on the Cleveland Avenue bus line in Montgomery when she refused to
give up her place in the front row of the 'colored section' to a white man who
could find no seat in the section reserved for whites. Her refusal to move to
the back of the bus defied local ordinances and Alabama state statutes requiring
segregation in public transportation. The driver called the police, and Parks
was arrested, jailed, and eventually convicted of violating segregation laws.
She was fined $10, plus $4 in court costs.
The black community in Montgomery was outraged by the case
and organized a bus boycott that began as a one-day demonstration. But the
boycott lasted 381 days in all, with nearly unanimous support from the 50,000
African Americans in Montgomery. Protesters formed an organization called the
Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) under the leadership of Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr., a minister who had recently moved to the city. The MIA urged
sympathizers not to ride on Montgomery’s segregated buses and helped them find
other means of transportation. In November 1956 the Supreme Court of the United
States upheld a federal court decision ordering the Montgomery buses
desegregated. The order took effect the following month, ending the boycott.
See also Segregation in the United States.
The Montgomery boycott was successful and brought King to
national attention. It also inspired other civil rights protests around the
South, such as sit-ins at segregated restaurants. However, both Rosa and Raymond
Parks lost their jobs and suffered repeatedly from harassment and threats. In
August 1957 the couple moved to Detroit, Michigan. They had difficulty finding
work during their first years in Detroit. Rosa Parks took in sewing and worked
as a fundraiser for the NAACP. In 1965 Democratic congressman John Conyers, Jr.,
hired her to work in his Detroit office. Parks remained on his staff until her
retirement in 1988.
Rosa Parks remained active in the NAACP and in other
civil rights organizations, including the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference (SCLC), until advancing age slowed her down. She received numerous
awards and tributes, including the NAACP’s highest honor, the Spingarn Medal, in
1970 and the prestigious Martin Luther King, Jr. Award in 1980. Cleveland Avenue
in the city of Montgomery was renamed Rosa Parks Boulevard in 1965. In 1987 she
founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development, which
provides scholarships and guidance for young blacks.
In 1996 President Bill Clinton awarded her the
Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor that the U.S. government can
give to a civilian, and in 1999 she received the Congressional Gold Medal from
the Congress of the United States. In January 1999 President Clinton invited
Parks to sit with Hillary Rodham Clinton during the annual State of the Union
address. During the speech President Clinton recognized the contributions of
Parks, who received a standing ovation from the audience.
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