Rosa Parks

Rosa Louise McCauley Parks (English: Rosa Louise McCauley Parks, February 4, 1913 – October 24, 2005) was an American black civil rights activist. In 1955, she was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white person on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, triggering the Montgomery bus boycott. The U.S. Congress later called her "the mother of the modern civil rights movement." Both her birthday, February 4, and the day of her arrest, December 1, have become Rosa Parks Day, commemorated regularly in California and Ohio. The Jim Crow laws were implemented at that time, and there were provisions for whites and blacks to sit separately. On December 1, 1955, bus driver James F. Blake ordered Parks to give up the "black seat" he was sitting in to a white passenger because the white seats were full. However, Parks refused to obey the driver's order and was arrested by the police. Parks was not the first to oppose segregated buses. Others, including Eileen Morgan in 1946, Sarah Louise Keyes in 1955, and members of the Browder v. Gale case arrested in Montgomery a few months earlier. When NAACP organizers saw her fight in the courts, they believed Parks was the best person to use civil disobedience to fight the Alabama segregation bill, although she ultimately failed in court while Browder v. Gale succeeded. Parks' defiance and the Montgomery bus boycott became important symbols of the modern African-American civil rights movement. She became an international anti-apartheid icon. She worked with other civil rights leaders, such as local chapter president Edgar Nixon and the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., to organize events. She later became actively involved in the more radical "Black Power" movement of the late 1960s and visited the Black Panther School in Oakland. At this time, Parks was secretary of the Montgomery Local Association. She attended Highland Folk School, a center for training workers' rights and racial equality activists in Tennessee. She played the role of an ordinary citizen who was "tired of giving in". Although she would receive many honors in the future, she was suppressed at the time; she was fired from her job as a seamstress in a local department store. Eventually, she ended up in Detroit, where she temporarily worked a similar job. From 1965 to 1988, she became secretary and receptionist to African-American Congressman John Conyers. After retiring, Parks published an autobiography and lived quietly.