Parks, Rosa (1913–2005)

Rosa Parks is best remembered for her role in the successful Montgomery Bus Boycott in the mid-1950s, which helped launch the modern civil rights [Page 1087]movement in the United States. Born Rosa Louise McCauley, on February 4, 1913, in Tuskegee, Alabama, she began attending the Montgomery Industrial School for Girls at age 11. After attending high school at the Alabama State Teachers College, she married Raymond Parks and moved to Montgomery.

Over the years, Parks worked behind the scenes to combat prejudice and discrimination against black people. Parks served as the secretary of the Montgomery National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and in the same capacity for the Alabama State Conference of NAACP branches. She also attended an interracial workshop at the Highlander Center, in Monteagle, Tennessee, where she learned techniques for combating segregation, registering voters, and building community networks.

On December 1, 1955, Parks boarded a Montgomery bus after completing her workday as a tailor's assistant for a downtown department store. She followed the prescribed customs of the state's Jim Crow laws when she boarded the bus. She paid at the front, got off, and reentered through the rear door. When the bus driver asked Parks to give up her seat for a white man who was standing, however, she refused. The driver called the police and Parks was arrested for violating a municipal ordinance.

E. D. Nixon, president of Montgomery's NAACP, arranged for bail for Parks. He believed that her arrest could be a catalyst to unite the black community in a boycott to end the segregation of the city's buses. Even though she feared such a boycott would lead to threats on her personal safety and a certain loss of her job, Parks agreed that the time to act had arrived. Nixon recruited the young Baptist minister Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., to serve as the spokesman of the newly formed Montgomery Improvement Association. King effectively used Parks's act of protest to build support for a citywide boycott of the bus routes by the black community. A federal district court ruled in December 1956 that the city's policy of segregating passengers was unconstitutional. The boycott ended in success after 381 days.

Parks and her husband moved to Detroit in 1957. In 1964, she supported a young black lawyer, John Conyers, in his bid for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. When Conyers won the election, he hired Parks to work as his secretary. Parks retired from Conyers's staff in 1988. In her advanced years, Parks received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal, among scores of other honors. Parks died on October 24, 2005, at the age of 92. She became the first women to lie in state at the U.S. Capitol.