Rosa Parks
“One person can change the world.”
-Rosa Parks.
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Rosa Parks (1913–2005), née Rosa Louise McCauley, 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. Her actions inspired the leaders of the local Black community to organize the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Led by a young Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Junior.
Rosa Louise McCauley was born in Tuskegee, Alabama, on February 4, 1913. Rosa moved to Montgomery, Alabama, at age 11 and eventually attended high school there, a laboratory school at the Alabama State, Teachers’ College for Negroes. She left at 16, early in 11th grade, because she needed to care for her dying grandmother and, shortly after that, her chronically ill mother. In 1932, at 19, Rosa married Raymond Parks, a self-educated man, 10 years her senior who worked as a barber and was a long-time member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He supported Rosa to earn her high-school diploma, which she ultimately did the following year.
Raymond and Rosa, who worked as seamstresses, became respected members of Montgomery’s large African American community. Co-existing with white people in a city governed by “Jim Crow” (segregation) laws, however, was fraught with daily frustrations: Black people could attend only certain (inferior) schools, could drink only from specified water fountains, and could borrow books only from the “Black” library, among other restrictions.
Although Raymond had previously discouraged her out of fear for her safety, in December 1943, Rosa also joined the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP and became chapter secretary. She worked closely with chapter president Edgar Daniel (E.D.) Nixon.
Her husband, brother, and mother all died of cancer between 1977 and 1979. In the years following her retirement, she traveled to lend her support to civil-rights events and causes and wrote an autobiography, “Rosa Parks: My Story.” In 1999, Parks was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest honor the United States bestows on a civilian. (Other recipients have included George Washington, Thomas Edison, Betty Ford, and Mother Teresa.) When she died at age 92 on October 24, 2005, she became the first woman in the nation’s history to lie in honor at the U.S. Capitol
