She did a lot more than just sit on a bus.
African American civil rights activist, who is often called the Mother of the Civil Rights Movement. Her arrest for refusing to give up her seat on a bus triggered the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 and 1956 and set in motion the test case for the desegregation of public transportation.
On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Parks was arrested for disregarding an order to surrender her bus seat to a white passenger. Her protest galvanized a growing movement to desegregate public transportation and marked a historic turning point in the African American battle for civil rights. Parks was much more than an accidental symbol, however. It is sometimes overlooked that at the time of her arrest, she was no ordinary bus rider; she was an experienced activist with strong beliefs. Rosa Louise McCauley was born in Tuskegee, Alabama. She was the granddaughter of former slaves and the daughter of James McCauley, a carpenter, and Leona McCauley, a rural schoolteacher.
She was raised by her mother, Leona Edward 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' 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.
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.
The future civil rights leader grew up in Montgomery, Alabama, where she attended the all-black Alabama State College. In 1932 she married Raymond Parks, a barber, with whom she became active in Montgomery's chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
Raymond Parks' volunteer efforts went toward helping free the defendants in the famous Scottsboro case, in which nine young black men were accused of raping two white women. Rosa Parks worked as the NAACP chapter's youth adviser. In 1943, when Rosa Parks actually joined the NAACP, her involvement with the organization became even greater. She worked with the organization's state president, Edgar Daniel Nixon, to mobilize a voter registration drive in Montgomery. That same year, Parks was elected secretary of the Montgomery branch.
In the early 1950s Parks found work as a tailor's assistant at a department store, Montgomery Fair. She also had a part-time job as a seamstress for Virginia and Clifford Durr, a white liberal couple; they encouraged Parks in her civil rights work. Six months before her famous protest, Parks received a scholarship to attend a workshop on school integration for community leaders. It was held at the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, and Parks spent several weeks there.
The segregated seating policies on public buses had long been a source of resentment within the black community in Montgomery and in other cities throughout the Deep South. African Americans were required to pay their fares at the front of the bus and then to reboard through the back door. The white bus drivers, who were invested with police powers, frequently harassed blacks, sometimes driving away before African American passengers were able to get back on the bus. During peak hours, the drivers pushed back the boundary markers that segregated the bus, crowding those in the "colored section" to provide more whites with seats.
On December 1, 1955, Parks took her seat in the front of the "colored section" of a Montgomery bus. The driver asked Parks and three other black riders to relinquish their seats to whites, but Parks refused (the others complied). The driver called the police, and Parks was arrested. She was released later that night after Nixon and the Durrs posted a $100 bond.
Although three black women had been arrested earlier that year for similar acts of defiance, and Parks herself had been thrown off a bus by the same driver 12 years before, this time the opponents of segregation were prepared to mount a counterattack. The Montgomery chapter of the NAACP had been looking for a test case to challenge the legality of segregated bus seating and to woo public opinion with a series of protests. The morning after her arrest, Parks agreed to let the NAACP take on her case. Another organization, the Women's Political Council (WPC), led by JoAnn Robinson, initiated the idea of a one-day bus boycott. Within 24 hours of Parks' defiance, the WPC had distributed more than 52,000 fliers announcing the bus boycott, which was to take place the day of Parks' trial. On December 5, as buses went through their routes almost empty, Parks was convicted by the local court. She refused to pay the fine of $14, and with the help of her lawyer, Fred D. Gray, she appealed to the circuit court.
On the evening of December 5, several thousand protesters crowded into the Holt Street Baptist Church to create the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA). They rallied behind its new president, Martin Luther King Jr., who had just moved to Montgomery as the new pastor at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. What was planned as a daylong bus boycott swelled to 381 days, during which time 42,000 protesters walked, carpooled, or took taxis rather than ride the segregated city buses of Montgomery (see Montgomery Bus Boycott). In a move designed to reverse the segregation laws on public transportation, King and the MIA filed a separate case in a United States district court. The district court ruled for the plaintiffs, declaring segregated seating on buses unconstitutional. The decision was later upheld by the Supreme Court of the United States.
Parks was widely known as the Mother of the Civil Rights Movement, but her iconic stature afforded her little financial security. She lost her job as a seamstress at Montgomery Fair and was unable to find other work in Montgomery. Parks and her husband relocated to Detroit, Michigan, in 1957, where they struggled financially for the next eight years. Parks' fortunes improved somewhat in 1965, when U.S. congressional representative John F. Conyers Jr. hired her as an administrative assistant, a position she held until 1987.
Parks has remained a committed activist. In the 1980s she worked in support of the South African antiapartheid movement, and in Detroit in 1987 she founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development, a career counseling center for black youth.
Parks has 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 1996 U.S. president Bill Clinton awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor that the U.S. government can give to a civilian and the United States Congress bestowed upon her the Congressional Gold Medal.
A friend once described Parks as someone who, as a rule, did not defy authority, but once determined on a course of action, refused to back down: "She might ignore you, go around you, but never retreat."
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