Rosa Parks

Early life

Rosa Louise McCauley was born on February 4, 1913, in Tuskegee, Alabama. She spent her early years on a small farm with her mother, grandparents and brother. As a child she saw Ku Klux Klan night rides. The family later moved to Montgomery, where she attended the laboratory school of Alabama State College and became a seamstress.

In 1932 she married Raymond Parks, a barber and NAACP member who had been active in the defense of the Scottsboro defendants.

Activism before 1955

Parks's protest on the bus came after more than a decade of organizing. She joined the Montgomery NAACP in 1943 and was elected branch secretary, a post she held until 1956. She registered to vote in 1945 after being refused twice, and she worked with the branch's Youth Council, whose members challenged segregation by trying to borrow books from whites-only libraries. As secretary of the Alabama State Conference of the NAACP she travelled the state interviewing victims of discrimination and witnesses to lynchings.

In the summer of 1955, with help from Virginia Durr, she attended a workshop on carrying out school desegregation at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, where she met Septima Clark.

The arrest and the boycott

On December 1, 1955, Parks was arrested in Montgomery for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger. She was 42. The King Institute points out that Claudette Colvin and Mary Louise Smith had been arrested earlier that year in similar cases without sparking a mass protest. Parks rejected the popular image of a seamstress who was simply physically tired. She said that what she was tired of was giving in.

On the day of her trial, December 5, the Women's Political Council called a one-day boycott of the city buses. That evening a mass meeting at Holt Street Baptist Church voted to continue it under the new Montgomery Improvement Association, led by Martin Luther King Jr. Parks helped arrange rides and was indicted with King and more than 80 others for taking part. The association's federal suit, Browder v. Gayle, won a ruling against bus segregation that the U.S. Supreme Court upheld on November 13, 1956. The boycott ended on December 20, 1956, after 381 days.

Detroit and later life

Parks lost her job at the Montgomery Fair department store and received death threats. In 1957 she and her family moved to Detroit. After John Conyers won his 1964 race for Congress, she worked in his office from 1965 until she retired in 1988. In 1987 she co-founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development to offer training and leadership programs for young people. She received the Congressional Gold Medal in 1999 and died in Detroit on October 24, 2005.

Legacy

Parks is often remembered for one act on a bus. The institutions that document her life put equal weight on the decades of NAACP casework, voter registration and youth organizing around it.