Rosa Parks

Rosa Parks was born Rosa Louise McCauley on February 4, 1913, in Tuskegee, Alabama, and was named after her two grandmothers. Her father, James McCauley, built houses in Macon County, Alabama; he chose contracting over teaching at Tuskegee Institute and later returned to the McCauley farm in Abbeville. Her mother, Leona McCauley, was a teacher who had to give up her job when she became pregnant.⁠[1]

In 1914 she moved with her family to Pine Level, Alabama, where she spent much of her childhood with her maternal grandparents and attended a one-room school. She grew up on a small farm with her mother, grandparents and brother, and witnessed Ku Klux Klan night rides and lynchings near her home.⁠[2][3][4]

At 11 she enrolled at the Montgomery Industrial School for Girls in Montgomery, attending from 1924 to 1929; she left school at 16 because of illness in her family. In 1933 she received a high school degree.⁠[3][2]

In 1931 she met Raymond Parks, a politically active barber, and they married in 1932. Raymond encouraged her to return to high school and earn her diploma. The couple organized in defense of the nine Scottsboro boys, who had been falsely accused of rape.⁠[5][6]

In 1943 Rosa Parks joined the Montgomery branch of the NAACP and was chosen as its secretary, serving until 1956. In the early 1940s she founded the Montgomery NAACP Youth Council and from 1949 served as its adviser; later, as secretary of the NAACP’s Alabama state conference, she investigated discrimination and lynchings across the state. Jeanne Theoharis notes that the branch focused on voter registration, youth outreach, legal remedies for victims of white violence and the defense of the wrongly accused.⁠[4][2][5]

In August 1955, sponsored by Clifford and Virginia Durr, she attended a workshop on school desegregation at the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, TennesseeTennesseeTennessee is a U.S. state in the southeast-central United States, with its capital at Nashville. It was admitted to the Union on June 1, 1796, as the 16th state, and the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted 6,910,840 residents.Open the full entry, where she studied methods of protest and citizenship training.⁠[2][5][3]

On the evening of December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on bus No. 2857 of the Cleveland Avenue route in Montgomery and was arrested for violating Montgomery’s segregation laws. About 12 years earlier she had clashed with the same driver, who had made her leave through the front door and re-board at the rear. She was arrested by two white policemen and briefly held in the Montgomery city jail; Clifford Durr and E. D. Nixon bailed her out.⁠[7][2][3][8]

At her trial on Monday, December 5, 1955, she was represented by Fred Gray and was fined $10 plus $4 in court costs. She appealed, formally challenging the legality of segregation.⁠[7][3]

Her arrest set off the Montgomery bus boycott, joined by 17,000 Black citizens; she helped organize the boycott and served as a carpool dispatcher for one month. The boycott lasted 381 days.⁠[4][2][5][7]

In January 1956 she lost her job as a tailor’s assistant at the Montgomery Fair department store; her husband also lost his job early in the boycott, and neither found steady work in Montgomery again. In 1956 she was arrested with other boycott organizers for violating anti-boycott laws. Throughout 1956 she traveled the country raising awareness and funds for the movement.⁠[2][5]

Her case led to Browder v. Gayle, a federal challenge to bus segregation. After the Supreme Court of the United States affirmed the ruling against segregation, she took a symbolic ride near the front of a bus in December 1956. The National Park Service notes that the Supreme Court ruling and falling bus revenues led the city to desegregate its buses some thirteen months after her arrest.⁠[3][4]

Having lost her job and received death threats, Parks moved with her family to Detroit in the summer of 1957 to join her brother and other relatives. That year she took part in the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom in Washington. In 1957–1958 she worked as hostess at the Holly Tree Inn of Hampton Institute in Hampton, VirginiaVirginiaVirginia, officially the Commonwealth of Virginia, is a U.S. state whose capital is Richmond. It entered the Union on June 25, 1788, as the 10th state, and had a population of 8,631,393 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry, returning to Detroit in late 1958; in 1959 the couple became caretakers of the Progressive Civic League building.⁠[4][5][2]

She took part in the 1963 March on Washington, volunteered in 1964 on John Conyers’s first campaign for Congress, and was invited that year to the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.⁠[5][3]

In 1965 she helped lead the final leg of the Selma-to-Montgomery march. From 1965 to 1988 she worked in U.S. Representative John Conyers’s Detroit district office, helping homeless people find housing, and retired in 1988. During these years she also remained active in the NAACP, supported prisoners, helped run the Detroit Friends of SNCC, opposed U.S. involvement in Vietnam and took part in the Black Power movement.⁠[3][4][2][5]

Raymond Parks died in 1977. In 1987 Rosa Parks and Elaine Eason Steele founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development in Raymond’s honor; it educated young people about civil and human rights and offered job training to Black youth.⁠[3][5][4]

Rosa Parks received the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal in 1979, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1996 and, from the 106th Congress, the Congressional Gold Medal in 1999. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference presents an annual Rosa Parks Freedom Award in her name.⁠[2][9][3]

Rosa Parks died in Detroit, MichiganMichiganMichigan is a state of the United States nearly surrounded by the Great Lakes and made up of the Upper and Lower peninsulas; its capital is Lansing and its largest city is Detroit. It was admitted to the Union on January 26, 1837, as the 26th state, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 10,077,331.Open the full entry, on October 24, 2005. Her casket was open for public viewing in the Capitol Rotunda on October 30 and 31, making her the first woman and the second Black American to lie in honor there. A memorial service in the Capitol on October 31 was attended by President George W. BushGeorge W. BushGeorge W. Bush (born 1946) is an American politician and Republican who worked in the energy business and was a part owner of the Texas Rangers baseball team before becoming the 46th governor of Texas in 1995 and serving as the 43rd president of the United States from 2001 to 2009.Open the full entry and First Lady Laura Bush, District of Columbia Mayor Anthony Williams, members of Congress and the Parks family.⁠[4][9]

On February 27, 2013, a full-size statue of Rosa Parks, commissioned under Public Law 109-116 as modified by Public Law 110-120, was unveiled in National Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol. It was the first full-size statue approved and funded by Congress since 1873. Created by sculptor Eugene E. Daub with Daub and Firmin Studios, the bronze statue stands on a black granite pedestal, is nearly nine feet tall including the pedestal and weighs about 2,700 pounds.⁠[10]

That year, her centennial, the U.S. Postal Service issued a stamp in her honor.⁠[7]

Rosa Parks published Rosa Parks: My Story with Jim Haskins (Dial Books, 1992), and, with Gregory J. Reed, Quiet Strength (Zondervan, 1994) and Dear Mrs. Parks (Lee and Low Books, 1996).⁠[2]

The Troy University Rosa Parks Museum opened on December 1, 2000, the 45th anniversary of her arrest, on the first floor of the Rosa Parks Library and Museum on Troy University’s Montgomery campus, built on the site of the former Empire Theatre where she had boarded the bus. Bus No. 2857 has been restored and is displayed inside Henry Ford Museum. In 2018 Alabama declared December 1 “Rosa Parks Day.”⁠[11][7][3]

Her papers, the Rosa Parks Papers, comprise about 9,700 items; the Howard G. Buffett Foundation placed them on deposit at the Library of Congress in 2014, converted the deposit into a gift in 2016 and made several further gifts between 2016 and 2020.⁠[2]

The Encyclopedia of Alabama calls her the “mother of the civil rights movement.” Jeanne Theoharis argues that Parks’s struggle for justice was lifelong and extended well beyond the bus.⁠[3][5]

Library of Congress (Rosa Parks Papers essay): Web page: https://www.loc.gov/collections/rosa-parks-papers/articles-and-essays/beyond-the-bus/ (opens in a new window).⁠[5]

National Park Service (Rosa Parks profile): Web page: https://www.nps.gov/people/rosa-parks.htm (opens in a new window).⁠[4]

The Henry Ford (the Rosa Parks bus): Web page: https://www.thehenryford.org/explore/stories-of-innovation/what-if/rosa-parks/ (opens in a new window).⁠[7]

Architect of the Capitol (Rosa Parks statue): Web page: https://aoc.gov/about-us/news-notices/rosa-parks-statue-joins-us-capitol-art-collection (opens in a new window).⁠[10]