Life

"Rosa Parks"

Rosa Parks was born in Tuskegee, Alabama on February 4, 1913. At the age of two she moved to her grandparents farm in Pine Level, Alabama with her mom and her younger brother. At age eleven she enrolled in the Montgomery Industrial School for Girls, a private school founded by liberal-minded women. After she attended Alabama State Teachers College she settled in Montgomery with her husband, Raymond Parks. Her and her husband joined the local chapter of the NAACP and worked many years on numerous cases to improve the lot of African-Americans in the segregated south.

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks ,42, boarded the Cleveland Avenue bus after a long days work at the Montgomery Fair department store where she worked as a seamstress. She sat in the fifth row, the first row of the "Colored Section". There were no more seats in the front of the bus when a white man boarded the bus and legally Rosa Parks was to give him her seat. When she refused the bus driver, the same man who had her put off a bus twelve years earlier for refusing to get off and re-board through the back door, had her arrested. Her bail was posted by Clifford Dunn, a white man whose wife had employed Parks. That night she decided to challenge the constitutionality of Montgomery's segregation laws.

This 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. This association called for the boycott of the city-owned bus company. The Montgomery Bus Boycott lasted 382 days and brought their cause attention from the world. A Supreme Court Decision stuck the Montgomery ordinance that Rosa Parks was jailed and fined under and outlawed racial segregation on public transportation.

In 1957, her and her husband moved to Detroit, Michigan where Rosa Parks served on the staff of Representative John Conyers. After her husband died in 1977 she founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development. In 1996 President Clinton presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 1999 she was the recipient of a Congressional Gold Medal.

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