rosaparks


 * Rosa Parks **



Rosa Parks was born on February 4, 1913, in Tuskegee, Alabama. When she was young, her parents separated and she moved with her mother to Pine Level, Alabama to live with her grandparents on their farm. Both her grandparents were former slaves and fought for racial equality. The city had a new school building and buses for white students while black students walked to the one-room schoolhouse that barely had desks or school supplies.

In 1929, while a junior in the eleventh grade, she left school to attend to her sick grandmother. She never returned, but instead got a job at a shirt factory in Montgomery. In 1932, Rosa married a barber named Raymond Parks who was an active member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He helped her finish her high school degree in 1933. She soon became involved in civil rights issues and joined the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP in 1943 where she served as the secretary to the president until 1957.

The Montgomery, Alabama, separate but equal accommodations for white and black passengers were given by assigning seats. There was a line in the middle separating whites at the front of the bus from blacks at the back of the bus. When the seats in the front of the bus filled up and more white passengers got on, the bus driver would move back the sign separating black and white passengers and sometimes ask black passengers give up their seat. On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks boarded the bus for home. She took a seat in the first of several rows designated for "colored" passengers. The bus Rosa was riding filled up with people and the driver noticed that some white people were standing. He stopped the bus and asked four black passengers to give up their seats. Rosa refused and remained seated.The driver called the police and had her arrested. The police arrested Rosa at the scene

After Rosa Parks was arrested, a boycott of Montgomery's city buses was organized. That meant that members of the African-American community were asked to stay off the buses on December 5, 1955 to protest of Rosa's arrest. The boycott was so successfull that they continued it. About 40,000 African-American commuters walked, some as far as 20 miles to get to work. Many public buses sat idle for months, and they lost a lot of money. In June 1956, the court declared Alabama's racial segregation laws for public transportation unconstitutional. The Montgomery Bus Boycott ended up being one of the largest and most successful actions against racial segregation in history.

After the boycott, Rosa moved to Detroit, Michigan. In 1987, she founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development which teaches young people about important civil rights and Underground Railroad sites throughout the country. In 1992, she published her autobiography //Rosa Parks: My Story//. On September 9, 1996 President Bill Clinton awarded Rosa Parks the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor given by the U.S. president. In 1999, //Time// magazine named Rosa Parks one of the 20 most influential people of the 20th century. Rosa Parks died on October 24, 2005, at the age of 92.