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ROSA LOUISE PARKS BIOGRAPHY

Rosa Louise Parks was nationally recognized as the “mother of the modern day civil rights movement” in America. Her refusal to surrender her seat to a white male passenger on a Montgomery, Alabama bus, December 1, 1955, triggered a wave of protest December 5, 1955 that reverberated throughout the United States. Her quiet courageous act changed America, its view of black people and redirected the course of history.

Mrs. Parks was born Rosa Louise McCauley, February 4, 1913 in Tuskegee, Alabama. She was the first child of James and Leona Edwards McCauley. Her brother, Sylvester McCauley, now deceased, was born August 20, 1915. Later, the family moved to Pine Level, Alabama where Rosa was reared and educated in the rural school. When she completed her education in Pine Level at age eleven, her mother, Leona, enrolled her in Montgomery Industrial School for Girls (Miss White’s School for Girls), a private institution. After finishing Miss White’s School, she went on to Alabama State Teacher’s College High School. She, however, was unable to graduate with her class, because of the illness of her grandmother Rose Edwards and later her death.

As Rosa Parks prepared to return to Alabama State Teacher’s College, her mother also became ill, therefore, she continued to take care of their home and care for her mother while her brother, Sylvester, worked outside of the home. She received her high school diploma in 1934, after her marriage to Raymond Parks, December 18, 1932. Raymond, now deceased was born in Wedowee, Alabama, Randolph County, February 12, 1903, received little formal education due to racial segregation. He was a self-educated person with the assistance of his mother, Geri Parks. His immaculate dress and his thorough knowledge of domestic affairs and current events made most think he was college educated. He supported and encouraged Rosa’s desire to complete her formal education.

Mr. Parks was an early activist in the effort to free the “Scottsboro Boys,” a celebrated case in the 1930′s. Together, Raymond and Rosa worked in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP’s) programs. He was an active member and she served as secretary and later youth leader of the local branch. At the time of her arrest, she was preparing for a major youth conference.

After the arrest of Rosa Parks, black people of Montgomery and sympathizers of other races organized and promoted a boycott of the city bus line that lasted 381 days. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was appointed the spokesperson for the Bus Boycott and taught nonviolence to all participants. Contingent with the protest in Montgomery, others took shape throughout the south and the country. They took form as sit-ins, eat-ins, swim-ins, and similar causes. Thousands of courageous people joined the “protest” to demand equal rights for all people.

Mrs. Parks moved to Detroit, Michigan in 1957. In 1964 she became a deaconess in the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME).

Congressman John Conyers First Congressional District of Michigan employed Mrs. Parks, from 1965 to 1988. In February, 1987, she co-founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development with Ms. Elaine Eason Steele in honor of her husband, Raymond (1903-1977). The purpose is to motivate and direct youth not targeted by other programs to achieve their highest potential. Rosa Parks sees the energy of young people as a real force for change. It is among her most treasured themes of human priorities as she speaks to young people of all ages at schools, colleges, and national organizations around the world.

The Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development’s “Pathways to Freedom program, traces the underground railroad into the civil rights movement and beyond. Youth, ages 11 through 17, meet and talk with Mrs. Parks and other national leaders as they participate in educational and historical research throughout the world. They journey primarily by bus as “freedom riders” did in the 1960′s,the theme: “Where have we been? Where are we going?”

As a role model for youth she was stimulated by their enthusiasm to learn as much about her life as possible. A modest person, she always encourages them to research the lives of other contributors to world peace. The Institute and The Rosa Parks Legacy are her legacies to people of good will.

Mrs. Parks received more than forty-three honorary doctorate degrees, including one from SOKA UNIVERSITY, Tokyo Japan, hundreds of plaques, certificates, citations, awards and keys to many cities. Among them are the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal, the UAW’s Social Justice Award, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Non – Violent Peace Prize and the ROSA PARKS PEACE PRIZE in 1994, Stockholm Sweden, to name a few. In September 1996 President William J. Clinton, the forty second President of the United States of America gave Mrs. Parks the MEDAL OF FREEDOM, the highest award given to a civilian citizen.

Published Act no.28 of 1997 designated the first Monday following February 4, as Mrs Rosa Parks’ Day in the state of Michigan, her home state. She is the first living person to be honored with a holiday.

She was voted by Time Magazine as one of the 100 most Influential people of the 20th century. A Museum and Library is being built in her honor, in Montgomery, AL and will open in the fall of the year 2000 (ground breaking April 21, 1998). On September 2, 1998 The Rosa L. Parks Learning Center was dedicated at Botsford Commons, a senior community in Michigan. Through the use of computer technology, youth will mentor seniors on the use of computers. (Mrs. Parks was a member of the first graduating class on November 24, 1998). On September 26, 1998 Mrs. Parks was the recipient of the first International Freedom Conductor’s Award by the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, Ohio.

She attended her first “State of the Union Address” in January 1999. Mrs. Parks received a unanimous bipartisan standing ovation when President William Jefferson Clinton acknowledged her. Representative Julia Carson of Indianapolis, Indiana introduced H. R. Bill 573 on February 4, 1999, which would award Mrs. Rosa Parks the Congressional Gold Medal of Honor if it passed the House of Representatives and the Senate by a majority. The bill was passed unanimously in the Senate on April 19, and with one descenting vote in the House of Representatives on April 20. President Clinton signed it into law on May 3, 1999. Mrs. Parks was one of only 250 individuals at the time, including the American Red Cross to receive this honor. President George Washington was the first to receive the Congressional Gold Medal of Honor. President Nelson Mandela is also listed among the select few of world leaders who have received the medal.

In the winter of 2000 Mrs. Parks met Pope John-Paul II in St. Louis, MO and read a statement to him asking for racial healing. She received the NAACP Image Award for Best Supporting Actress in the Television series, TOUCHED BY AN ANGEL, “Black like Monica”. Troy State University at Montgomery opened The Rosa Parks Library and Museum on the site where Mrs. Parks was arrested December 1, 1955. It opened on the 45th Anniversary of her arrest and the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

“The Rosa Parks Story” was filmed in Montgomery, Alabama May 2001, an aired February 24, 2002 on the CBS television network. Mrs. Parks continues to receive numerous awards including the very first Lifetime Achievement Award ever given by The Institute for Research on Women & Gender, Stanford University. She received the Gandhi, King, Ikeda award for peace and on October 29, 2003 Mrs. Parks was an International Institute Heritage Hall of fame honoree. On February 4, 2004 Mrs. Parks 91st birthday was celebrated at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History. On December 21, 2004 the 49th Anniversary of the Mrs. Parks’ arrest was commemorated with a Civil Rights and Hip-Hop Forum at the Franklin Settlement in Detroit, Michigan.

On February 4, 2005 Mrs. Parks’ 92nd birthday was celebrate at Calvary Baptist Church in Detroit, MI. Students from the Detroit Public Schools did “Willing to be Arrested,” a reenactment of Mrs. Parks arrest. February 6, 2005 Mrs. Parks received the first annual Cardinal Dearden Peace Award at Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Detroit, MI. February 19 – 20, composer Hannibal Lokumbe premiered an original symphony “Dear Mrs. Parks.” Mr. Lokumbe did this original work as part of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra’s ” Classical Roots Series.” The beginning of many events that will commemorate the 50th Anniversary of Mrs. Parks’ arrest December 1, 1955.

Mrs. Parks has written four books, Rosa Parks: My Story: by Rosa Parks with Jim Haskins, Quiet Strength by Rosa Parks with Gregory J. Reed, Dear Mrs. Parks: A Dialogue With Today’s Youth by Rosa Parks with Gregory J, Reed, this book received the NAACP’s Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work, (Children’s) in 1996 and her latest book, I AM ROSA PARKS by Rosa Parks with Jim Haskins, for preschoolers.

A quiet exemplification of courage, dignity, and determination; Rosa Parks was a symbol to all to remain free. Rosa Parks made her peaceful transition October 24, 2005.

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Who was Rosa Parks?

Why is rosa parks important, was rosa parks the first black woman to refuse to give up her seat on a segregated bus.

• When did the American civil rights movement start?

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• Blackpast.org - Biography of Rosa Parks
• PBS LearningMedia - Rosa Parks
• The Henry Ford - Rosa Parks: What if I Don’t Move to the Back of the Bus?
• National Women's History Museum - Rosa Parks
• Encyclopedia of Alabama - Rosa Parks
• The Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute - Rosa Parks
• Spartacus Educational - Biography of Rosa Parks
• Bill of Rights Institute - Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Montgomery Bus Boycott
• Iowa State University - Archives of Women's Political Communication - Rosa Parks
• National Archives - An Act of Courage, The Arrest Records of Rosa Parks
• Academy of Achievement - Rosa Parks
• Rosa Parks - Children's Encyclopedia (Ages 8-11)
• Rosa Parks - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)

Rosa Parks was an American civil rights activist whose refusal to give up her seat on a public bus precipitated the 1955–56 Montgomery bus boycott in Alabama, which became the spark that ignited the civil rights movement in the United States . She is known as the “mother of the civil rights movement.”

When Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, city bus for white passengers in 1955, she was arrested for violating the city’s racial segregation ordinances. Her action sparked the Montgomery bus boycott , led by the Montgomery Improvement Association and Martin Luther King, Jr. , that eventually succeeded in achieving desegregation of the city buses. The boycott also helped give rise to the American civil rights movement .

Rosa Parks was not the first Black woman to refuse to give up her seat on a segregated bus, though her story attracted the most attention nationwide. Nine months before Parks, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin had refused to give up her bus seat, as had dozens of other Black women throughout the history of segregated public transit.

What did Rosa Parks write?

In 1992 Rosa Parks published Rosa Parks: My Story , an autobiography written with Jim Haskins that described her role in the American civil rights movement , beyond her refusal to give up her seat on a segregated public bus to white passengers.

Rosa Parks (born February 4, 1913, Tuskegee , Alabama , U.S.—died October 24, 2005, Detroit , Michigan) was an American civil rights activist whose refusal to relinquish her seat on a public bus precipitated the 1955–56 Montgomery bus boycott in Alabama, which became the spark that ignited the civil rights movement in the United States .

Born to parents James McCauley, a skilled stonemason and carpenter, and Leona Edwards McCauley, a teacher, in Tuskegee, Alabama, Rosa Louise McCauley spent much of her childhood and youth ill with chronic tonsillitis . When she was two years old, shortly after the birth of her younger brother, Sylvester, her parents chose to separate. Estranged from their father from then on, the children moved with their mother to live on their maternal grandparents’ farm in Pine Level, Alabama, outside Montgomery. The children’s great-grandfather, a former indentured servant , also lived there; he died when Rosa was six.

For much of her childhood, Rosa was educated at home by her mother, who also worked as a teacher at a nearby school. Rosa helped with chores on the farm and learned to cook and sew. Farm life, though, was less than idyllic . The Ku Klux Klan was a constant threat, as she later recalled, “ burning Negro churches, schools, flogging and killing ” Black families. Rosa’s grandfather would often keep watch at night, rifle in hand, awaiting a mob of violent white men. The house’s windows and doors were boarded shut with the family, frequently joined by Rosa’s widowed aunt and her five children, inside. On nights thought to be especially dangerous, the children would have to go to bed with their clothes on so that they would be ready if the family needed to escape. Sometimes Rosa would choose to stay awake and keep watch with her grandfather.

Rosa and her family experienced racism in less violent ways, too. When Rosa entered school in Pine Level, she had to attend a segregated establishment where one teacher was put in charge of about 50 or 60 schoolchildren. Though white children in the area were bused to their schools, Black children had to walk. Public transportation, drinking fountains, restaurants, and schools were all segregated under Jim Crow laws . At age 11 Rosa entered the Montgomery Industrial School for Girls, where Black girls were taught regular school subjects alongside domestic skills. She went on to attend a Black junior high school for 9th grade and a Black teacher’s college for 10th and part of 11th grade. At age 16, however, she was forced to leave school because of an illness in the family, and she began cleaning the houses of white people.

In 1932, at age 19, Rosa married Raymond Parks, a barber and a civil rights activist, who encouraged her to return to high school and earn a diploma. She later made a living as a seamstress. In 1943 Rosa Parks became a member of the Montgomery chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and she served as its secretary until 1956.

On December 1, 1955, Parks was riding a crowded Montgomery city bus when the driver, upon noticing that there were white passengers standing in the aisle, asked Parks and other Black passengers to surrender their seats and stand. Three of the passengers left their seats, but Parks refused. She was subsequently arrested and fined $10 for the offense and $4 for court costs, neither of which she paid. Instead, she accepted Montgomery NAACP chapter president E.D. Nixon’s offer to help her appeal the conviction and thus challenge legal segregation in Alabama. Both Parks and Nixon knew that they were opening themselves to harassment and death threats, but they also knew that the case had the potential to spark national outrage. Under the aegis of the Montgomery Improvement Association —led by the young pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Martin Luther King, Jr. —a boycott of the municipal bus company began on December 5. African Americans constituted some 70 percent of the ridership, and the absence of their bus fares cut deeply into revenue. The boycott lasted 381 days, and even people outside Montgomery embraced the cause: protests of segregated restaurants, pools, and other public facilities took place all over the United States. On November 13, 1956, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s decision declaring Montgomery’s segregated bus seating unconstitutional, and a court order to integrate the buses was served on December 20; the boycott ended the following day. For her role in igniting the successful campaign, Parks became known as the “mother of the civil rights movement.”

Simplifications of Parks’s story claimed that she had refused to give up her bus seat because she was tired rather than because she was protesting unfair treatment. But she was an accomplished activist by the time of her arrest, having worked with the NAACP on other civil rights cases, such as that of the Scottsboro Boys , nine Black youths falsely accused of sexually assaulting two white women. According to Parks’s autobiography, “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 42. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.” Parks was not the first Black woman to refuse to give up her bus seat for a white person—15-year-old Claudette Colvin had been arrested for the same offense nine months earlier, and dozens of other Black women had preceded them in the history of segregated public transit . However, as secretary of the local NAACP, and with the Montgomery Improvement Association behind her, Parks had access to resources and publicity that those other women had not had. It was her case that forced the city of Montgomery to desegregate city buses permanently.

In 1957 Parks moved with her husband and mother to Detroit, where from 1965 to 1988 she worked on the staff of Michigan Congressman John Conyers, Jr. She remained active in the NAACP, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference established an annual Rosa Parks Freedom Award in her honor. In 1987 she cofounded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development to provide career training for young people and offer teenagers the opportunity to learn about the history of the civil rights movement. She received numerous awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1996) and the Congressional Gold Medal (1999). Her autobiography, Rosa Parks: My Story (1992), was written with Jim Haskins.

Though achieving the desegregation of Montgomery’s city buses was an incredible feat, Parks was not satisfied with that victory. She saw that the United States was still failing to respect and protect the lives of Black Americans. Martin Luther King, Jr., who had been brought to national attention by his organization of the Montgomery bus boycott , was assassinated less than a decade after Parks’s case was won. Biographer Kathleen Tracy noted that Parks, in one of her last interviews, would not quite say that she was happy: “I do the very best I can to look upon life with optimism and hope and looking forward to a better day, but I don’t think there is any such thing as complete happiness. It pains me that there is still a lot of Klan activity and racism. I think when you say you’re happy, you have everything that you need and everything that you want, and nothing more to wish for. I haven’t reached that stage yet.”

After Parks died in 2005, her body lay in state in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol , an honor reserved for private citizens who performed a great service for their country. For two days mourners visited her casket and gave thanks for her dedication to civil rights. Parks was the first woman and only the second Black person to receive the distinction.

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Two policemen came on the bus, and one asked me if the driver had told me to stand. He wanted to know why I didn’t stand, and I told him I didn’t think I should have to stand up. I asked him, why did they push us around? He said, I don’t know, but the law is the law and you are under arrest.

Most historians date the beginning of the modern civil rights movement in the United States to December 1, 1955. That was the day when an unknown seamstress in Montgomery, Alabama refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger. This brave woman, Rosa Parks, was arrested and fined for violating a city ordinance, but her lonely act of defiance began a movement that ended legal segregation in America, and made her an inspiration to freedom-loving people everywhere.

Rosa Parks was born Rosa Louise McCauley in Tuskegee, Alabama to James McCauley, a carpenter, and Leona McCauley, a teacher. At the age of two she moved to her grandparents’ farm in Pine Level, Alabama with her mother and younger brother, Sylvester. At the age of 11 she enrolled in the Montgomery Industrial School for Girls, a private school founded by liberal-minded women from the northern United States.

The school’s philosophy of self-worth was consistent with Leona McCauley’s advice to “take advantage of the opportunities, no matter how few they were.” Opportunities were few indeed. “Back then,” Mrs. Parks recalled in an interview, “we didn’t have any civil rights. It was just a matter of survival, of existing from one day to the next. I remember going to sleep as a girl hearing the Klan ride at night and hearing a lynching and being afraid the house would burn down.” In the same interview, she cited her lifelong acquaintance with fear as the reason for her relative fearlessness in deciding to appeal her conviction during the bus boycott. “I didn’t have any special fear,” she said. “It was more of a relief to know that I wasn’t alone.” After attending Alabama State Teachers College, the young Rosa settled in Montgomery, with her husband, Raymond Parks. The couple joined the local chapter of the NAACP and worked quietly for many years to improve the lot of African Americans in the segregated South. 

“I worked on numerous cases with the NAACP,” Mrs. Parks recalled, “but we did not get the publicity. There were cases of flogging, peonage, murder, and rape. We didn’t seem to have too many successes. It was more a matter of trying to challenge the powers that be, and to let it be known that we did not wish to continue being second-class citizens.”

The bus incident led to the formation of the Montgomery Improvement Association, led by the young pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The association called for a boycott of the city-owned bus company. The boycott lasted 381 days and brought Mrs. Parks, Dr. King, and their cause to the attention of the world. A Supreme Court decision struck down the Montgomery ordinance under which Mrs. Parks had been fined, and outlawed racial segregation on public transportation.

In 1957, Mrs. Parks and her husband moved to Detroit, Michigan, where Mrs. Parks served on the staff of U.S. Representative John Conyers. The Southern Christian Leadership Council established an annual Rosa Parks Freedom Award in her honor.

After the death of her husband in 1977, Mrs. Parks founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development. The Institute sponsors an annual summer program for teenagers called Pathways to Freedom. The young people tour the country in buses, under adult supervision, learning the history of their country and of the civil rights movement. President Clinton presented Rosa Parks with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1996. She received a Congressional Gold Medal in 1999.

When asked if she was happy living in retirement, Rosa Parks replied, “I do the very best I can to look upon life with optimism and hope and looking forward to a better day, but I don’t think there is any such thing as complete happiness. It pains me that there is still a lot of Klan activity and racism. I think when you say you’re happy, you have everything that you need and everything that you want, and nothing more to wish for. I haven’t reached that stage yet.”

Mrs. Parks spent her last years living quietly in Detroit, where she died in 2005 at the age of 92. After her death, her casket was placed in the rotunda of the United States Capitol for two days, so the nation could pay its respects to the woman whose courage had changed the lives of so many. She was the first woman and the second African American to lie in honor at the Capitol, a distinction usually reserved for Presidents of the United States.

View and listen to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s historic “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered on the steps of Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., August 28, 1963.

Member of the American Academy of Achievement, poet and best-selling author, Maya Angelou  shares her interpretation of Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

Rosa Parks, the “Mother of the Civil Rights Movement” was one of the most important citizens of the 20th century. Mrs. Parks was a seamstress in Montgomery, Alabama when, in December of 1955, she refused to give up her seat on a city bus to a white passenger. The bus driver had her arrested. She was tried and convicted of violating a local ordinance.

Her act sparked a citywide boycott of the bus system by blacks that lasted more than a year. The boycott raised an unknown clergyman named Martin Luther King, Jr., to national prominence and resulted in the U.S. Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation on city buses. Over the next four decades, she helped make her fellow Americans aware of the history of the civil rights struggle. This pioneer in the struggle for racial equality was the recipient of innumerable honors, including the Martin Luther King Jr. Nonviolent Peace Prize and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Her example remains an inspiration to freedom-loving people everywhere.

In 1955, you refused to give up your seat to a white passenger on a public bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Your act inspired the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the event historians call the beginning of the modern Civil Rights Movement. Could you tell us exactly what happened that day?

Rosa Parks: I was arrested on December 1, 1955 for refusing to stand up on the orders of the bus driver, after the white seats had been occupied in the front. And of course, I was not in the front of the bus as many people have written and spoken that I was — that I got on the bus and took the front seat, but I did not. I took a seat that was just back of where the white people were sitting, in fact, the last seat. A man was next to the window, and I took an aisle seat and there were two women across. We went on undisturbed until about the second or third stop when some white people boarded the bus and left one man standing. And when the driver noticed him standing, he told us to stand up and let him have those seats. He referred to them as front seats. And when the other three people — after some hesitancy — stood up, he wanted to know if I was going to stand up, and I told him I was not. And he told me he would have me arrested. And I told him he may do that. And of course, he did.   Two policemen came on the bus and one asked me if the driver had told me to stand and I said, “Yes.” And he wanted to know why I didn’t stand, and I told him I didn’t think I should have to stand up. And then I asked him, why did they push us around? And he said, and I quote him, “I don’t know, but the law is the law and you are under arrest.”  And with that, I got off the bus, under arrest.

Did they take you down to the police station?

Rosa Parks: Yes. A policeman wanted the driver to swear out a warrant, if he was willing, and he told him that he would sign a warrant when he finished his trip and delivered his passengers, and he would come straight down to the City Hall to sign a warrant against me.

Did he do that?

Rosa Parks: Yes, he did.

Did the public response begin immediately?

Rosa Parks: Actually, it began as soon as it was announced.

It was put in the paper that I had been arrested. Mr. E.D. Nixon was the legal redress chairman of the Montgomery branch of the NAACP, and he made a number of calls during the night, called a number of ministers. I was arrested on a Thursday evening, and on Friday evening is when they had the meeting at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where Dr. Martin Luther King was the pastor. A number of citizens came, and I told them the story and from then on, it became news about my being arrested. My trial was December 5, when they found me guilty. The lawyers Fred Gray and Charles Langford, who represented me, filed an appeal and, of course, I didn’t pay any fine. We set a meeting at the Holt Street Baptist Church on the evening of December 5th, because December 5th was the day the people stayed off in large numbers and did not ride the bus.   In fact, most of the buses, I think all of them were just about empty with the exception of maybe very, very few people.   When they found out that one day’s protest had kept people off the bus, it came to a vote and unanimously, it was decided that they would not ride the buses anymore until changes for the better were made.

When you refused to stand up, did you have a sense of anger at having to do it?

Rosa Parks: I don’t remember feeling that anger, but I did feel determined to take this as an opportunity to let it be known that I did not want to be treated in that manner and that people have endured it far too long. However, I did not have at the moment of my arrest any idea of how the people would react. And since they reacted favorably, I was willing to go with that. We formed what was known as the Montgomery Improvement Association, on the afternoon of December 5th. Dr. Martin Luther King became very prominent in this movement, so he was chosen as a spokesman and the president of the Montgomery Improvement Association.

What are your thoughts when you look back on that time in your life. Any regrets?

As I look back on those days, it’s just like a dream. The only thing that bothered me was that we waited so long to make this protest and to let it be known wherever we go that all of us should be free and equal and have all opportunities that others should have.

What personal characteristics do you think are most important to accomplish something?

Rosa Parks: I think it’s important to believe in yourself and when you feel like you have the right idea, to stay with it. And of course, it all depends upon the cooperation of the people around. People were very cooperative in getting off the buses. And from that, of course, we went on to other things. I, along with Mrs. Field, who was here with me, organized the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development. Raymond, my husband—he is now deceased—was another person who inspired me, because he believed in freedom and equality himself.

You were married during the bus incident.

Rosa Parks: Yes, I was.

How old were you?

Rosa Parks: When I was arrested, I was 42 years old. There were so many needs for us to continue to work for freedom, because I didn’t think that we should have to be treated in the way we were, just for the sake of white supremacy, because it was designed to make them feel superior, and us feel inferior. That was the whole plan of racially enforced segregation.

What was it like in Montgomery when you were growing up?

Rosa Parks: Back in Montgomery during my growing up there, it was completely legally enforced racial segregation, and of course, I struggled against it for a long time.   I felt that it was not right to be deprived of freedom when we were living in the Home of the Brave and Land of the Free.   Of course, when I refused to stand up, on the orders of the bus driver, for a white passenger to take the seat, and I was not sitting in the front of the bus, as so many people have said, and neither was my feet hurting, as many people have said. But I made up my mind that I would not give in any longer to legally-imposed racial segregation and of course my arrest brought about the protests for more than a year.   And in doing so, Dr. Martin Luther King became prominent because he was the leader of our protests along with many other people.   And I’m very glad that this experience I had then brought about a movement that triggered across the United States and in other places.

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Rosa Parks Biography

The effort eventually led to a Supreme Court decision that ended segregation on transportation in the United States.

Born Rosa Louise McCauley on Feb. 4, 1913 in Tuskegee, Ala., she was the daughter of a carpenter and a teacher. At age 2, she moved to her grandparents’ farm in rural Alabama with her mother and younger brother, Sylvester. It was not long after that Rosa Parks developed a thirst for education and deep faith in God that would sustain her for the challenges that would lay head.

After attending the Montgomery Industrial School for Girls, a private school founded by liberal northern women in the United States, Parks continued her education at the Alabama State Teachers College. She then settled with her husband, Raymond Parks, a barber, in Montgomery.

Often called the “mother of the civil rights movement,” Parks was no stranger to trying to defeat what had been known as the “Jim Crow South.” She and her husband worked for the local Montgomery chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or NAACP. She even served as the organization’s secretary and later became an adviser to the NAACP Youth Council.

Parks also was involved with the Montgomery Voters League, a group that helped black people pass a test so they could register to vote.

At the time, segregation laws required blacks to use “colored” restrooms, water fountains and even separate entrances to restaurants and buses.

It was customary for black bus patrons in Montgomery to board the bus and pay their fare to the driver; then exit and re-board the bus using the back entrance. Sometimes the bus would drive off before paying customers could make it to the back door.

Black passengers were required to sit on the rear of the bus behind white passengers.

On Dec. 1, 1955, after a tiring day of work as a seamstress, Parks would make a decision that would change history. She later said about that evening, “I did not get on the bus to get arrested; I got on the bus to go home.”

As the bus became overcrowded, the bus driver asked Rosa to give up her seat for a white passenger, and she refused. The driver then threatened to call the police and have her arrested. She replied, “You may go ahead and do so.”

After being jailed, Parks was granted one phone call and contacted E.D. Nixon, a prominent member of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP.

Her bail was posted by Clifford Durr, a white lawyer and husband of the woman who employed Parks as a seamstress. After talking to her mother and husband, she decided to challenge Montgomery’s laws that segregated public transportation.

Later that night, at a meeting of the Women’s Political Council, 35,000 handbills were made and circulated to all black schools in Montgomery. According to Time magazine, they read: “We are … asking every Negro to stay off the buses Monday in protest of the arrest and trial. … You can afford to stay out of school for one day. If you work, take a cab, or walk. But please, children and grownups, don’t ride the bus at all on Monday. Please stay off the buses Monday.”

Monday came, and so did a strong chance of rain, but blacks in Montgomery stayed off the buses. Many walked, joined several car pools, or caught black-operated cabs that stopped at public bus stops for 10 cents, which was the standard bus fare.

The following day, Parks was found guilty of failure to comply with a city ordinance and fined $14, which she did not pay. As a result, the Montgomery Improvement Association was formed. Its leader was a young minister of Dexter Baptist Church and a relative newcomer to the city, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

The Montgomery Bus boycott lasted 381 days and financially devastated Montgomery’s public transportation system.

Parks’ case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, and in November 1956, the high court ruled that segregation on transportation is unconstitutional. Montgomery’s public transportation system was legally integrated Dec. 21, 1956.

After losing her job and receiving many death threats, Rosa and Raymond Parks moved to Detroit in 1957. Rosa Parks got a position in the office of Rep. John Conyers, a Michigan Democrat.

Although Parks never quite became comfortable with the spotlight, she understood her integral role in the civil rights movement.

“I understand I am a symbol,” she wrote. However, “I am still uncomfortable with the credit given to me for starting the bus boycott; I would like people to know I was not the only person involved. I was just one of many who fought for freedom.”

Parks’ commitment to equality did not end with desegregation of transportation; she went on to become a vocal opponent of apartheid in South Africa and the co-founder of the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping youth reach their fullest potential.

In February of 1990, she was honored at Washington’s Kennedy Center on her 77th birthday and would later receive several prestigious awards, including the Medal of Freedom, presented by then-President Clinton in 1996. Three years later, she was given the Congressional Gold Medal of Honor.

The bus on which Parks refused to surrender her seat was purchased in 2001 for $492,000 and is on display at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich.

In September 1994, Parks was robbed and beaten in her Detroit apartment. She wrote of the event, “I pray for this young man and the conditions in our country that have made him this way. Despite the violence and crime in our society, we should not let fear overwhelm us. We must remain strong.”

She fully recovered from the incident and participated in the Million Man March in Washington, D.C. in October 1995.

Parks wrote several books, including “Quiet Strength,” which chronicles her life and the historical day in 1955, as well as a children’s book entitled, “Rosa Parks: My Story.”

She died on Oct. 24, 2005 of natural causes at her home in Detroit at age 92.

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Rosa Parks: Timeline of Her Life, Montgomery Bus Boycott and Death

After the bus boycott, Parks continued to participate in the civil rights movement. She attended the March on Washington in 1963 and in 1965 witnessed the signing of the Voting Rights Act . Her later years saw Parks' work recognized with the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal.

The following timeline covers notable events and achievements in Parks' long and remarkable life:

February 4, 1913: Rosa Louise McCauley born in Tuskegee, Alabama to James and Leona McCauley

1919: A six-year-old Parks begins picking cotton alongside her grandparents. She also starts attending a segregated school in Pine Level, Alabama.

1924: As there is no local school for Black children to attend after the sixth grade, McCauley goes to Miss White’s Montgomery Industrial School for Girls in Montgomery, Alabama.

1929: Parks leaves school in the 11th grade to care for her ill grandmother and mother.

1931: While Parks is working as a housekeeper for a white family, a white neighbor attempts to rape her .

1931: Parks is introduced to Raymond Parks, whom she later described as being the first activist she encountered.

December 18, 1932: Rosa weds Raymond Parks

1933: Parks returns to school and obtains her high school diploma, a notable accomplishment at a time when very few Black people in Alabama held this degree.

1941: Parks starts work at Maxwell Air Force Base, which has an integrated cafeteria and trolley system.

December 1943: Parks joins the Montgomery branch of the NAACP

As the only woman at her first meeting, she is named secretary of the group. Parks' work for the NAACP will also include investigating crimes against Black people such as murder, assaults and police brutality.

Parks attempts to register to vote but is told she failed the literacy test required of Black voters.

September 1944: Recy Taylor, a Black woman, is gang-raped by six white men. The Montgomery NAACP dispatches Parks to investigate the case.

Parks helps establish the Committee for Equal Justice for the Rights of Mrs. Recy Taylor to advocate for legal action against Taylor's assailants. The case becomes national news but the rapists are never convicted.

1945: After taking the required literacy test for a third time, Parks becomes a registered voter. Yet before she can cast a ballot, she must pay a retroactive poll tax of $1.50 for every year since she reached the voting age of 21.

1948 : Parks becomes the Alabama state secretary for the NAACP.

1949: Parks steps back as NAACP secretary to take care of her mother.

1952: Parks returns to the Montgomery NAACP and once more becomes a branch secretary.

August 1955: Parks attends a two-week training session at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee. Alongside other civil rights activists, both Black and white, she discusses how to integrate schools following the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954.

December 1, 1955: In Montgomery, Parks defies a bus driver's order to let a white man take her seat

The driver, who had treated Parks rudely and evicted her from his bus in 1943, contacts the police and she is arrested.

December 5, 1955: Though Parks was not the first Black woman arrested for defying segregation on city buses, news of her case spurs the Black community to begin a boycott of Montgomery buses .

Parks' trial takes place. She is found guilty and fined $10, plus $4 in court costs. Her lawyers file an appeal.

January 7, 1956: Parks is let go from her job as a tailor's assistant at the Montgomery Fair department store.

January 1956: Raymond quits his barbershop job after discussion of his wife and the boycott is forbidden.

February 21, 1956: Along with dozens of other civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr. , Parks is indicted for violating a Montgomery law outlawing boycotts.

February 22, 1956: Parks is among a group of indicted boycott leaders who present themselves for arrest. She is quickly released. The case against Parks is eventually dismissed.

1956: During the boycott, Parks serves as a dispatcher to coordinate carpools. She also travels across the country to speak about the boycott.

December 21, 1956: Following a Supreme Court ruling that segregated buses are unconstitutional, the 381-day boycott ends. Parks is photographed sitting at the front of a bus for Look magazine.

August 1957: Unable to find work in Montgomery and still facing threats for her role in the bus boycott, Parks and her family depart for Detroit

October 1957: Parks becomes a hostess at the Holly Tree Inn, part of the Hampton Institute in Virginia, but leaves after the fall semester in 1958 to rejoin her husband and mother in Detroit.

1959: Parks begins doing piecework for Detroit's Stockton Sewing Company, a job she holds through 1964.

July 1960: A Jet magazine article reveals that Parks and her family have been struggling financially, due in part to her health problems.

August 28, 1963: Parks attends the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom . No women are invited to speak at the event, but Parks is among those singled out for a "Tribute to Women" in the civil rights movement.

March 1, 1965: Parks takes a job in the Detroit office of newly elected Congressman John Conyers, where her tasks include answering phones and aiding constituents. She stays in this position until her retirement in 1988.

March 25, 1965: Parks joins the march to Montgomery for equal voting rights. Many of the marchers do not recognize her but in the end she is acknowledged and invited to speak at the capitol building.

August 6, 1965: Parks is among those present to witness President Lyndon Johnson's signing of the Voting Rights Act.

July 23, 1967: Parks is in Detroit during five days of rioting. Amid the upheaval, her husband's barbershop is destroyed.

August 30, 1967: A "People's Tribunal" is held regarding the deaths of three young Black men during the Detroit riots. Parks serves on the jury, which finds the police who were at the scene guilty (the officers faced no such repercussions in the legal system).

August 19, 1977: Parks' husband, Raymond, dies.

August 1979: The NAACP presents Parks with its highest accolade, the Spingarn Medal.

January 14, 1980: Parks is given the Martin Luther King Jr. Nonviolent Peace Prize

1987: Parks establishes the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development, intended to help young people better understand the past and prepare for their futures.

1992: Rosa Parks: My Story , an autobiography for younger readers, is published.

August 30, 1994: Parks is robbed and beaten by a mugger inside her home.

October 16, 1995: At the invitation of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, Parks attends the Million Man March in Washington, D.C.

1994: Another book by Parks, entitled Quiet Strength , is published.

September 15, 1996: Parks is presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Bill Clinton .

June 15, 1999: Parks receives the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest legislative honor in the United States.

April 14, 2005: Parks and the hip-hop group Outkast reach an out-of-court settlement regarding their 1998 song "Rosa Parks."

October 24, 2005: Parks dies at the age of 92

Her body is brought to lie in honor at the U.S. Capitol Rotunda, the first time for a woman to receive this recognition.

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Rosa parks (1913-2005).

Revered as one of the most influential people of the twentieth century, Rosa Parks is best known for her role in the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1956 . Parks was born on February 4, 1913, to Leona and James McCauley in Tuskegee, Alabama. Leona worked as a teacher and James as a carpenter. Parks was schooled by her mother until the age of eleven when she moved to Montgomery with an aunt and started attending the Montgomery Industrial School for girls. She even took a job as a janitor to support her private school education. Though Parks began to attend Alabama State Teacher’s College High School, she dropped out to care for ill family members.

After marrying barber and local political activist Raymond Parks in 1931, she became an active member of Montgomery’s NAACP, where she served as youth director and later as the secretary. She also participated in the organization’s voter registration drives. Parks became an advocate of desegregation and took pride in being a member of the organization that won the Brown v. Board of Education case.

On December 1, 1955, following the end of her shift as a seamstress for the Montgomery Fair department store, Parks boarded the Cleveland Avenue city bus. As passengers boarded the bus, Parks and other African American riders were asked to give up their seats once the “whites only” section had filled. Parks refused. Like other advocates of desegregation, Parks placed herself in danger by refusing to follow Montgomery’s segregation laws. She was arrested and received a $14 fine. This was Parks’s second encounter with the bus driver James Blake (he had kicked Parks off a bus many years prior to this incident).

Parks called local NAACP president E.D. Nixon , and informed him of her arrest. Within hours, the Women’s Political Council (WPC) —which was formed in 1946 to address the grievances of black bus patrons in Montgomery—sprang into action. The WPC printed flyers and brochures, phoned potential supporters, and created carpools, marking the beginning of the 381-day Montgomery Bus Boycott. After a long protest, the US Supreme Court declared bus segregation unconstitutional in 1957.

Following the boycott, Parks moved to Detroit, Michigan with her husband and worked as a seamstress before taking a job as an assistant to Detroit Congressman John Conyers. In 1987, she founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development, which teaches students about the Civil Rights Movement and encourages them to strive for success.

Parks received numerous honors, including over 40 honorary degrees, the Medal of Freedom, the Congressional Gold Medal of Honor, and two NAACP image awards. The state of Michigan honors Parks each February 4 on Rosa Parks Day. Troy State University in Alabama honored Parks by constructing a museum and library that bears her name. The Henry Ford Museum in Michigan also preserved Parks’ legacy by purchasing the Cleveland Avenue bus she rode on December 1, 1955. In addition to authoring several books about her story, in 2002, Parks teamed up with CBS to produce a biographical film titled “The Rosa Parks Story.”

On October 5, 2005, Rosa Parks passed away in Detroit. She was 92 years old. Later that month she became one of only 30 Americans and the first woman to lie in honor in the Capitol Rotunda. In 2013, her statue was added to Statuary Hall in the same building. She was the first African American woman so honored.

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Cite this entry in APA format:

Source of the author's information:.

Edna Chappell McKenzie, “Rosa Parks” in Black Women in America: Social Activism , edited by Darlene Clark Hine (New York: Facts on File, Inc., 1997); Lisa Hill, “Rosa Parks” in African American Women: a Biographical Dictionary , edited by Dorothy C. Salem (New York: Garland Publishing, 1993); Rosa and Raymond Parks Institution for Self Development http://www.rosaparks.org/bio.html (accessed November 11, 2007); E.R. Shipp, “Rosa Parks, 92, Founding Symbol of Civil Rights Movement Dies,” New York Times , October 25, 2005; Patricia Sullivan, “Bus Ride Shook a Nation’s Conscience,” Washington Post , October 25, 2005; Andrea James, “Rosa Parks Biography,” PBS NewsHour , October 25, 2005, http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/remember/july-dec05/parks_biography.html (accessed December 29, 2013).

The hidden life of Rosa Parks - Riche D. Richardson

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Learn about the life of civil rights activist Rosa Parks— her work with the NAACP, bus boycotts, and her lifelong fight against racial inequality. – Throughout her life, Rosa Parks repeatedly challenged racial violence and the prejudiced systems protecting its perpetrators. Her refusal to move to the back of a segregated bus ignited a boycott that lasted 381 days and helped transform civil rights activism into a national movement. But this work came at an enormous risk— and a personal price. Riché D. Richardson details the life of Rosa Parks. Lesson by Riché D. Richardson, directed by Eido. Animator's website: https://www.eido.co/ Sign up for our newsletter: http://bit.ly/TEDEdNewsletter Support us on Patreon: http://bit.ly/TEDEdPatreon Follow us on Facebook: http://bit.ly/TEDEdFacebook Find us on Twitter: http://bit.ly/TEDEdTwitter Peep us on Instagram: http://bit.ly/TEDEdInstagram View full lesson: https://ed.ted.com/lessons/the-hidden-life-of-rosa-parks-riche-d-richardson Thank you so much to our patrons for your support! Without you this video would not be possible! Scott Gass, Ruth Fang, Mayank Kaul, Kathryn J Hammond, Max Shuai Tang , Terry Minion, Sami Khan, Rob Johnson, Abdullah Abdulaziz, Angelo Urzua-Milla, Tommy Lewis, leorene , Mahina Bachiller, Marcus Andre Nery, Bruce Vieira Lopes, Chef, Charmaine Hanson, Michael Goldberg, Lydia Pflieger, Paul Aldred-Bann, Manav parmar, Susan Wang, Utkarsh Dubey, Thawsitt, Xuebicoco, Jezabel, Maeve, Kim Humphrey, Kristen Damas, JackKeyton , Matthew D. Vigil, Amin Shahril, Adriano Fontes, Xiao Yu, Fatima Kried, Aravind Battaje, Melissa Suarez, Jason Duncan, Brian A. Dunn, Francisco Amaya, Daisuke Goto, Matt Switzler, Chhunheng Veng, Leonardo Monrroy, Sumedh Ghaisas, Guhten, Amer Harb, Dowey Baothman and Norbert Orgován.

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In 1943, Rosa Parks was appointed as Secretary of the Montgomery Chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Born: February 4,1913

Departed: October 24, 2005

Known as the mother of the Civil Rights Movement, Rosa Parks is most recognized for refusing to give up her seat on a segregated public bus. That decision sparked the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott in Alabama. 

Rosa Louise McCauley was born on February 4, 1913, in Tuskegee, Alabama. She grew up on their maternal grandparents’ farm outside of Montgomery, Alabama, with her mother and brother.  

Her devotion to the Christian faith developed at an early age.  She was baptized at Mount Zion AME Church in Pine Level, Alabama, at the age of two.  

In 1919, she attended the Pine Level segregated school. Then, in 1924 she interrupted her schooling to be the primary caretaker for her ailing grandmother and mother.  

In 1932, Rosa married Raymond Parks.  

She went on to attend Montgomery Industrial School and Alabama State Teachers College to complete her high school education by 1934.

Religion to Activism

Park’s Christian faith in God emboldened her with the courage to stand up to segregation. 

She was an active member at St. Paul AME Church in Montgomery, Alabama, where she served as a church stewardess and taught Sunday School.  

In her autobiography Quiet Storm , she recalled that “I felt the Lord would give me the strength to endure whatever I had to face. God did away with all my fear,” when she notably refused to give her bus seat to a white male passenger on December 1, 1955.  

Her refusal resulted in an arrest that propelled her to international fame, though sometimes her activism was misconstrued.

She later wrote in Rosa Parks: My Story that

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.

Parks worked with local and national leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. to use her protest as a catalyst for change.  

The 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott was one of the most definitive and successful public protests of the Civil Rights Movement, which ultimately desegregated public buses with a ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court.  

However, backlash from the victory and the threat of violence forced Parks and her husband to leave Montgomery for Detroit, Michigan, where they lived for the rest of their lives.  

Civil Rights Leadership

Though Parks became a symbol of the movement because of her refusal to give up her seat on a bus, she was engaged in a variety of activism before and after the event.  

She spent most of her life contributing to community building, beginning with her membership in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). 

She interviewed victims of injustice, maintained organizational files, and participated in numerous protests like the 1930s campaign to free unjustly imprisoned Black youth, known as the Scottsboro Boys.  

Her faith continued to be present in all her activism, including her participation in the 1957 Prayer Pilgrimage to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., where she and thousands of people from across the United States prayed for freedom and equal rights.  

Her activism was so highly regarded that the Southern Christian Leadership Conference inaugurated the annual Rosa Parks Freedom Award in 1963. 

Shepherding Social Change

Parks continued to be involved with the movement in the 1963 March on Washington, the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer, the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign, along with a host of other significant protests.  

She worked as a congressional aide to Congressman John Conyers for over two decades.  

During the 1970s and 1980s, Rosa received the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal, the UAW’s Social Justice Award, and the Martin Luther King, Jr., Nonviolent Peace Prize. 

In the 1990s, the Smithsonian unveiled a bust in her likeness. The Rosa Parks Peace Prize was established in Stockholm, Sweden. She received the Congressional Gold Medal, and the Medal of Freedom was awarded to her by President Bill Clinton.  

After her death in 2005, her body lay in the United States Capitol Rotunda. She was the first woman to receive that distinction and visitors from around the world came to pay their respects.  

Many public memorials have been erected in her honor, including a sculpture unveiled on Capitol Hill in 2006.  

Rosa Parks’ staunch faith and civil disobedience continue to inspire new generations of activists who propel the fight for freedom forward in the 21st century.  

Their continued activism is the ultimate expression of her legacy, since as she stated in her 1987 Eyes on the Prize oral interview “I would like to be remembered as a person who wanted to be free… so other people would be also free.”

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'Rosa Parks: In Her Own Words' Reveals The Real Person Behind The Icon

Casey Noenickx

"Rosa Parks: In Her Own Words" is a collection of the civil rights activist's writings, documents and photos on display at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Mhari Shaw/NPR hide caption

"Rosa Parks: In Her Own Words" is a collection of the civil rights activist's writings, documents and photos on display at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

Rosa Parks is best remembered as the African American woman who refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man. It was 1955 in the segregated South and the start of the Montgomery bus boycott.

That moment made her the face of the civil rights movement — but there was much more to her than that single act of defiance.

As a young girl in Alabama in the 1920s, Parks often stayed up all night, helping her grandfather Sylvester Edwards keep watch. In the years after World War I, the Ku Klux Klan rode throughout black communities, terrorizing families, burning churches and homes.

A display includes photos of Rosa Parks's family and handwritten letters about her grandparents. Mhari Shaw/NPR hide caption

A display includes photos of Rosa Parks's family and handwritten letters about her grandparents.

The two wanted to be prepared, so her grandfather "always had his shotgun within hand's reach," Parks wrote when she was 6 or 7. "I wanted to see him kill a Ku-Kluxer. He declared the first to invade our home would surely die."

Code Switch

After years in lockdown, rosa parks' papers head to library of congress.

In Montgomery, Rosa Parks' Story Offers A History Lesson For Police

This handwritten note is among the documents, photos and heirlooms such as her family's Bible now on display in Rosa Parks: In Her Own Words . The new exhibit at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., aims to reveal the real person behind the civil rights icon known by many only as a demure seamstress.

"She was a radical. She maintained a calm demeanor," says Adrienne Cannon, the exhibit's curator. "But beneath the surface was always that militant spirit, and that buoyed her, and that guided her throughout her life."

Rosa Parks is shown in her booking photo after her arrest in 1955. Her act of civil disobedience sparked the Montgomery bus boycott. Universal History Archive/Getty Images hide caption

Rosa Parks is shown in her booking photo after her arrest in 1955. Her act of civil disobedience sparked the Montgomery bus boycott.

Parks was "feisty," says Carla Hayden, the 14th librarian of Congress. "It becomes clear as you walk through the exhibit that her family were feisty people. These were not folks who sit by and let things happen to them."

In fact, Hayden points out, in the 1950s, in the segregated South and with the threat of physical harm, it took immense courage to fight publicly for civil rights.

"At that point, you get a sense that she was making a conscious decision, that she was going to do what she could to help others. And she was going to take the risk," Hayden says.

On Dec. 1, 1955, 42-year-old Parks boarded a bus in Montgomery, Ala., and stayed seated when she was told move to the back of the vehicle.

Carla Hayden, the librarian of Congress, says Rosa Parks' strength comes through in the forcefulness of her writing. Mhari Shaw/NPR hide caption

Carla Hayden, the librarian of Congress, says Rosa Parks' strength comes through in the forcefulness of her writing.

"I had been pushed around all my life," she wrote later, reflecting on the incident, "and felt at this moment that I couldn't take it anymore."

She was arrested on charges of civil disobedience. At the Library of Congress exhibit, her arrest record and fingerprints are interspersed between her handwritten notes.

"I sat in a little room with bars before I was moved to a cell with two other women," she remembered. "I felt that I had been deserted, but I did not cry."

Fingerprints taken after Parks' arrest are on display at the Library of Congress. Mhari Shaw/NPR hide caption

Fingerprints taken after Parks' arrest are on display at the Library of Congress.

Political buttons, brochures and photographs in the exhibit show how the civil rights movement rallied around Parks as she faced consequences from her arrest.

"People have a view of Rosa Parks as this very sedate woman with a purse. And that's the iconic image, and she was just tired," says Hayden, referring to the common explanation given for why Parks did not move.

Parks' handwritten reflections on her arrest. Rosa Parks Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress hide caption

Parks' handwritten reflections on her arrest.

"What this exhibit does is show you that there was so much more to Rosa Parks — in terms of her belief in civil rights, her determination and also the hardships that she endured because of that."

Parks' commitment to the civil rights movement continued throughout her life. She spoke at NAACP meetings around the country and stayed involved in civil rights cases on a national level. As photos from the exhibit show, she struck close friendships with prominent activists such as Angela Davis and Stokely Carmichael. In 1995, at age 82, she spoke at the Million Man March. Parks died a decade later, in 2005.

"She was active politically and she was right up to the minute," Hayden says. "Rosa Parks kept her hand in the game a little bit."

"Rosa Parks: In Her Own Words" opened on Dec. 5 in Washington, D.C. Mhari Shaw/NPR hide caption

"Rosa Parks: In Her Own Words" opened on Dec. 5 in Washington, D.C.

Erin Covey, Kelli Wessinger and Dalia Mortada produced and edited this story for broadcast. Maureen Pao edited the digital story.

• Library of Congress
• civil rights
• Montgomery Bus Boycott

Commemorating Rosa Parks' Activism

More Than A Seat On The Bus

T oday marks the 60th anniversary of the arrest of Mrs. Rosa Parks in Montgomery, Alabama. We all know the popular story of what happened on that cold December day in 1955. Indeed, it has become an American myth. A soft-spoken seamstress with tired feet refused to move to the back of the bus to make room for a white man. Her spontaneous action and subsequent arrest sparked a yearlong boycott of the city’s buses that brought down Jim Crow in the cradle of the Confederacy. And the path to black equality was cleared.

But that story, of Rosa Parks tiptoeing into history, both oversimplifies the deep roots of the boycott and disregards the bold actions of the many black women who made the Montgomery movement about more than a seat on a bus. In truth, the Montgomery Bus Boycott was a protest against racial and sexual violence, and Rosa Parks’s arrest on December 1, 1955 was but one act in a life devoted to the protection and defense of black people generally, and black women specifically. Indeed, the bus boycott was, in many ways, the precursor to the #SayHerName twitter campaigns designed to remind us that the lives of black women matter.

In 1997, an interviewer asked Joe Azbell, former city editor of the Montgomery Advertiser , who was the most important person in the bus boycott. Surprisingly, he did not say Rosa Parks. “Gertrude Perkins,” he said, “is not even mentioned in the history books, but she had as much to do with the bus boycott as anyone on earth.” On March 27, 1949, Perkins was on her way home from a party when two white Montgomery police officers arrested her for “public drunkenness.” They pushed her into the backseat of their patrol car, drove to a railroad embankment, dragged her behind a building, and raped her at gunpoint.

Left alone on the roadside, Perkins somehow mustered the courage to report the crime. She went directly to the Holt Street Baptist Church parsonage and woke Reverend Solomon A. Seay Sr., an outspoken minister in Montgomery. “We didn’t go to bed that morning,” he recalled. “I kept her at my house, carefully wrote down what she said and later had it notarized.” The next day, Seay escorted Perkins to the police station. City authorities called Perkins’s claim “completely false” and refused to hold a line-up or issue any warrants since, according to the mayor, it would “violate the Constitutional rights” of the police. Besides, he said, “my policemen would not do a thing like that.”

But African Americans knew better. What happened to Gertrude Perkins was no isolated incident. Montgomery’s police force had a reputation for racist and sexist brutality that went back years, and black leaders in the city were tired of it. When the authorities made clear that they would not respond to Perkins’s claims, local NAACP activists, labor leaders, and ministers formed an umbrella organization called the “Citizens Committee for Gertrude Perkins.” Rosa Parks was one of the local activists who demanded an investigation and trial, and helped maintain public protests that lasted for two months.

By 1949 Rosa Parks was an experienced anti-rape activist. The campaign on behalf of Perkins, for example, was modeled on a protest Parks helped launch several years earlier for Recy Taylor , a young black mother kidnapped and brutally raped in 1944 in the town of Abbeville, Alabama, by a group of white men who threatened to kill her if she told anyone. Taylor reported the crime anyway and the Montgomery NAACP sent Parks to Abbeville to investigate. After gathering Taylor’s testimony, Parks carried it back to Montgomery, where she and other activists launched “The Committee for Equal Justice for Mrs. Recy Taylor,” a nationwide campaign that demanded protection for black womanhood and accountability for Taylor’s assailants.

Two years after the protest on behalf of Gertrude Perkins, meanwhile, black activists rallied to defend yet another victim of white sexual violence in Montgomery. In February 1951, a white grocer named Sam Green raped a black teenager named Flossie Hardman whom he employed as a babysitter. After Hardman told her parents about the attack, they decided to press charges, and when an all-white jury returned a not-guilty verdict after five minutes of deliberation, the family reached out to community activists for help. Together, individuals such as Rufus Lewis , who organized voter registration campaigns, Rosa Parks, who was still serving as secretary of the Montgomery NAACP chapter, and members of the newly formed Women’s Political Council , launched a boycott of Green’s grocery store. After only a few weeks, African Americans delivered their own guilty verdict by driving Green’s business into the red.

By the early 1950s, then, a history of sexual assaults on black women and of the use of the boycott as a powerful weapon for justice had laid the groundwork for what was to come. Given that history, it made sense that city buses served as the flashpoint for mass protest. Other than police officers, few were as guilty of committing acts of racist violence and sexual harassment of black women as Montgomery’s bus operators, who bullied and brutalized black passengers daily. Worse, bus drivers had police power. They carried blackjacks and guns, and they assaulted and sometimes even killed African Americans who refused to abide by the racial order of Jim Crow.

In 1953 alone, African Americans filed over thirty formal complaints of abuse and mistreatment on the buses. Most came from working-class black women, mainly domestics, who made up nearly 70% of the bus ridership. They said drivers hurled nasty, sexualized insults at them, touched them inappropriately, and physically abused them. In May 1954, JoAnn Robinson, leader of the Women’s Political Council, threatened a boycott of Montgomery’s city buses, and only after months of futile efforts to get city officials to address the problem did the boycott finally come into being. Women walked rather than ride the buses, Rosa Parks said in 1956, not in support of her, but because she “was not the only person who had been mistreated and humiliated.” Other women, she said, “had gone through similarly shameful experiences, most worse than mine.”

These experiences propelled African American women into every conceivable aspect of the boycott. Women were the chief strategists and negotiators of the boycott and ran its day-to-day operation. Women helped staff the elaborate car pool system, raised most of the local money for the movement, and filled the majority of the pews at the mass meetings, where they testified publicly about physical and sexual abuse on the buses. And of course, by walking hundreds of miles to protest their humiliation, African American women reclaimed their bodies and demanded the right to be treated with dignity and respect.

Rooted in the struggle to protect and defend black womanhood from racial and sexual violence, the Montgomery Bus Boycott is impossible to understand and situate in its proper historical context without understanding the stories and saying the names of Gertrude Perkins, Flossie Hardman, Recy Taylor, and all the black women who were mistreated in Montgomery.

Today, as we celebrate the anniversary of Rosa Parks’s arrest, witness the growth of the #BlackLivesMatter movement on city streets and campus quads across the country, and #SayHerName to demand an end to police violence against women of color, we should look to the past – and remember it correctly. Parks and the women who started the Montgomery bus boycott fought for more than a seat on the bus. They demanded the right to move through the world without being molested, fought against police brutality and racial and sexual violence, and insisted on the right to ownership and control of their own bodies.

14 Comments

This is a great piece. How is this not more widely known?

I imagine there are probably a number of reasons. One of them is likely because her archival papers were the subject of a long legal dispute only settled last year when they were sold to the Buffet Foundation .

The collection is now on 10 year loan to the Library of Congress and available for the first time to researchers as of this year .

Not entirely. there is a terrific biography, now out in paperback, the Rebellious life of Mrs. Rosa Parks by Jeanne Theoharis.

Is this the Frank Joyce from Detroit? If so, I’d love to talk with you about my research on activism surrounding the Algiers Motel murders in Detroit in 1967. –Danielle McGuire

One of the reasons I love this article is its explicit rejection of the ‘kindly grandmother’ myth with Parks. That myth is part of why we don’t know as much about her – her anti-lynching work, her post-Montgomery work on urban, northern poverty in Detroit, her radicalism. They don’t fit into the safe narrative of a nice lady who just got tired and fed up. It’s easier and safer for mainstream America to not see her as an ‘agitator’.

I also had no idea about Parks’ work in this area, but I’m so glad I do now, and I’ll be giving these to my high school juniors when we look at Montgomery later this year.

Thank you so much! Let me know if you’d like me to send you anything else to use. I have some of the original docs from these cases.

That would be wonderful – I’m always on the lookout for short, readable primary sources that 11th graders who struggle with reading might be able to handle. The Sam Green story in particular, as well as citizen complaints, seem like they could be really useful in class. I’ll email you directly. Much appreciated!

I just find it fascinating that the sexual violence in this story was so completely erased. I mean, you read this and think, “Of course!” But I had truly never heard this part of the story before. And once you know it, you recognize that you cannot understand that event– that incredibly well-known and important event– without having this piece of the puzzle. So we have all been operating with the wrong picture.

Thanks, Heather. For more details, check out the first three chapters of my book. I’m happy to send you a copy.

This is a great piece and such important work you are doing Prof. Mcguire, thank you! I’d love to talk with you more about racialized sexual violence, in relation to the broader history of racial violence/terror, which I am presently focused on further documenting and studying. I have been reading your excellent book.

Also important to the contextualization you give is the widespread racial abuse and violence on Jim Crow buses leading up to the 1950s. Margaret Burnham has written an excellent piece (All Aboard: Soldiers and Buses) in a special issue of Race & Justice I recently co-edited, where she examines racial homicides of black soldiers on city buses, often by deputized bus drivers, and the denial of legal protection or recourse. You can find that essay here: http://raj.sagepub.com/content/5/2.toc

Thank you so much for your work! I have provided training in the anti-rape movement for years and do workshops on the history of the anti-rape movement. But i will forever be telling it differently now that i have ready Dark End of the Street. And much more accurately, giving homage to the women of color who deserve it! Imagine all the white feminists like myself who have been telling groups for years that “the anti-rape movement began in the 60s!” Shame on US!!! Thank you for pulling back the covers! If you’d ever be interested in doing a workshop let me know!!

Excellent job Ms.Mcguire. In the midst of the STANFORD UNIVERSITY RAPE CASE, I find it interesting how quickly CNN, FOX NEWS, MSNBC and even Vice President Joe Biden spoke against the ruling by the judge who sentenced Brock Turner to 6 months in jail for raping that young lady. This story has prompted Ashleigh Bamfield to conduct a Town Hall Meeting this Tuesday on College Campus Rape that will be aired on CNN for a global audience to view. Karin Roland (Chief Campaign Officer for the website Ultra Violet), gathered 1.2 million signatures to have the judge in the case removed from the bench.I’ve emailed Ms. Roland to ask her to use that same passion and intensity to bring attention to Chester Thompson ( who while employed as a Civil Public Servant aka Police Officer with Syracuse, New York), RAPED Maleatra Montanez ( a copper complexioned woman) while he was in uniform and on duty in her apartment. Officer Chester Thompson RAPED Ms. Maleatra Montanez and made her face her newborn baby while he RAPED her. Ms. Montanez NEVER SAID YES to Chester Thompson’s sexual advances and feared for her life. Chester Thompson had a known history of raping women while on duty as a Police Officer for the city of Syracuse,New York. Chester Thompson received NO PRISON TIME FOR HIS RAPING of Maleatra Montanez. Let’s see if Karin Roland responds to my email so we may have a Globally televised Town Hall Meeting on (White male) Police Officers RAPING “Black” women. Chester Thompson needs to have his Police Pension taken from him, be registered as a sexual predator, have his gun taken from him and never allowed to work as a police officer or any other public civil servant job anywhere on this planet. Yesterday on the Fox News program Justice w/ Judge Jeanine, Judge Jeanine Pirro spoke about Brock Turner’s rape victim and I quote ” That victim will live with this for the rest of her life.” Does this not apply to the countless numbers of “Black” women being raped by White Male Police Officers?

Thank you for posting this. I teach US History and AP US History in Iowa. I am taking an online class in Southern History from Delta State from Dr. Westmoreland and have viewed your lecture, “To Gain Title to Our Bodies: Black Women and the Long Civil Rights Movement” from March of 2015. This has provided my with a great deal more perspective on the bus boycott specifically and the issue of sexualized violence in general.

There is a book out written by my Aunt Joann Robinson. It’s called the Women Who Started The Montgomery Bus Boycott. She work along with Rosa Parks and numerous of others who help during that time.

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She Made History

Her Story: Trailblazers, Barrier Breakers, Leaders

Her Story: Rosa Parks

Rosa Louise McCauley Parks (1913-2005) was best known for her roll in the Montgomery Bus Boycott as an American Civil Rights activist. On December 1st, 1955, Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus in the “colored section” to a white passenger. Parks was arrested for civil disobedience because she was violating Alabama segregation laws. She was a well known figure in her community, news of her arrest spread quickly. Her willingness to stand up to the injustice of segregation inspired a movement in the African American community to boycott the buses in Montgomery for over a year. This was the first major action campaign of the Civil Rights Movement. 

Parks was an important beacon for others in the Civil Rights Movement and an icon of resistance to segregation. However, she suffered dearly for her defiance. Both she and her husband lost their jobs, and they struggled to find employment in the community again. She received death threats for many years. Eventually the family was forced to relocate.

Parks remained a Civil Rights activist over the next half-century, she became a symbol of dignity and strength for America to follow.

“I would like to be remembered as a person who wanted to be free… so other people would be also free.” – Rosa Parks

Links for Learning:

ROSA LOUISE PARKS BIOGRAPHY

Rosa Parks – HISTORY

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Rosa-Parks

https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/rosa-parks

The life of Rosa Parks

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