(1913–2005). To make important changes, most people have to stand up. Yet when Rosa Parks sat down and refused to stand up, the U.S. civil rights movement was born.
Early Life
Rosa Louise McCauley was born on February 4, 1913, in Tuskegee, Alabama. Her family moved to Pine Level, Alabama, when she was about 2 years old. When she went to school, all the students at the school were African American. By law, Rosa could not go to school with white students. She could not use the same restrooms. She could not eat at “white” restaurants. African Americans and whites drank from different fountains and rode in different sections of the buses. Keeping African Americans and whites apart was called segregation.
In 1932, Rosa married a barber named Raymond Parks. He was a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The NAACP worked to make life better and fairer for African Americans. In 1943, Rosa Parks also became involved with the NAACP. She was secretary of the Montgomery, Alabama, chapter until 1956.
The Bus Ride
On December 1, 1955, Parks took the bus home from her job as a seamstress. Montgomery city buses then had three sections of seats: a front section for whites, a back section for blacks, and a middle section. Blacks could sit in the middle section only until a white person requested a seat. Parks sat in the middle section. When the driver told Parks to give a white man her seat, she refused. The driver called the police, and Parks was arrested, jailed, and fined.
The arrest angered African Americans in Montgomery. They met in churches and talked about what to do. Soon, they decided to boycott the buses, which meant that until the laws changed, they would not ride buses. A minister named Martin Luther King, Jr., led the boycott.
The boycott lasted more than a year. In 1956, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered bus operators to stop segregating buses. They ruled that the practice was against the U.S. Constitution. The next day, Rosa Parks got on a Montgomery bus. This time she sat where she wanted.
Rosa Parks had given hope to people who believed in equal rights. All over the south, they started breaking segregation laws. Soon the unfair laws began to change. This was the beginning of the civil rights movement.
The Parks family paid a price, though. After her arrest, Rosa was fired from her job. She could not find more work in Montgomery. Angry white people made threats against the Parks family. In 1957 the family moved to Detroit, Michigan.
Later Life
Parks worked in the office of Michigan Congressman John Conyers, Jr., from 1965 until she retired in 1988. The Parkses also kept working with the NAACP and other civil rights groups.
Rosa Parks received many awards; 10 colleges and universities granted her honorary degrees. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference set up a yearly Rosa Parks Freedom Award. In 1979, the NAACP gave her its Spingarn Medal. In 1987 she co-founded an institute to help educate young people and teach them leadership skills. She later received two of the highest honors a civilian can receive from the U.S. government. First, President Bill Clinton gave her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1996. Then, in 1999, she received the Congressional Gold Medal of Honor for her contributions to the civil rights movement. Rosa Parks died in Detroit, Michigan, on October 24, 2005.