Rosa Parks

Rosa Parks, Rosa Louise McCauley (1913- ), African American civil rights activist, who is often called the Mother of the Civil Rights Movement. Her arrest for refusing to give up her seat on a bus triggered the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 and 1956 and set in motion the test case for the desegregation of public transportation.

On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks was arrested for disregarding an order to surrender her bus seat to a white passenger. Her protest galvanized a growing movement to desegregate public transportation and marked a historic turning point in the African American battle for civil rights. Rosa Parks was much more than an accidental symbol, however. It is sometimes overlooked that at the time of her arrest, she was no ordinary bus rider; she was an experienced activist with strong beliefs.

Rosa Louise McCauley was born in Tuskegee, Alabama. She was the granddaughter of former slaves and the daughter of James McCauley, a carpenter, and Leona McCauley, a rural schoolteacher. The future civil rights leader grew up in Montgomery, Alabama, where she attended the all-black Alabama State College. In 1932 she married Raymond Rosa Parks, a barber, with whom she became active in Montgomery's chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Raymond Parks's volunteer efforts went toward helping free the defendants in the famous Scottsboro case, in which nine young black men were accused of raping two white women. Rosa Rosa Parks worked as the NAACP chapter's youth adviser. In 1943, when Rosa Rosa Parks actually joined the NAACP, her involvement with the organization became even greater. She worked with the organization's state president, Edgar Daniel Nixon, to mobilize a voter registration drive in Montgomery. That same year, Rosa Parks was elected secretary of the Montgomery branch.

In the early 1950s Rosa Parks found work as a tailor's assistant at a department store, Montgomery Fair. She also had a part-time job as a seamstress for Virginia and Clifford Durr, a white liberal couple; they encouraged Rosa Parks in her civil rights work. Six months before her famous protest, Rosa Parks received a scholarship to attend a workshop on school integration for community leaders. It was held at the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, and Rosa Parks spent several weeks there.

The segregated seating policies on public buses had long been a source of resentment within the black community in Montgomery and in other cities throughout the Deep South. African Americans were required to pay their fares at the front of the bus and then to reboard through the back door. The white bus drivers, who were invested with police powers, frequently harassed blacks, sometimes driving away before African American passengers were able to get back on the bus. During peak hours, the drivers pushed back the boundary markers that segregated the bus, crowding those in the “colored section” to provide more whites with seats.

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks took her seat in the front of the “colored section” of a Montgomery bus. The driver asked Rosa Parks and three other black riders to relinquish their seats to whites, but Rosa Parks refused (the others complied). The driver called the police, and Rosa Parks was arrested. She was released later that night after Nixon and the Durrs posted a $100 bond.

Although three black women had been arrested earlier that year for similar acts of defiance, and Rosa Parks herself had been thrown off a bus by the same driver 12 years before, this time the opponents of segregation were prepared to mount a counterattack. The Montgomery chapter of the NAACP had been looking for a test case to challenge the legality of segregated bus seating and to woo public opinion with a series of protests.

The morning after her arrest, Rosa Parks agreed to let the NAACP take on her case. Another organization, the Women's Political Council (WPC), led by JoAnn Robinson, initiated the idea of a one-day bus boycott. Within 24 hours of Rosa Parks's defiance, the WPC had distributed more than 52,000 fliers announcing the bus boycott, which was to take place the day of Rosa Parks's trial. On December 5, as buses went through their routes almost empty, Rosa Parks was convicted by the local court. She refused to pay the fine of $14, and with the help of her lawyer, Ed D. Gray, she appealed to the circuit court.

Rosa Parks was widely known as the Mother of the Civil Rights Movement, but her iconic stature afforded her little financial security. She lost her job as a seamstress at Montgomery Fair and was unable to find other work in Montgomery. Rosa Parks and her husband relocated to Detroit, Michigan, in 1957, where they struggled financially for the next eight years. Rosa Parks's fortunes improved somewhat in 1965, when U.S. congressional representative John F. Conyers Jr. hired her as an administrative assistant, a position she held until 1987..

Rosa Parks has remained a committed activist. In the 1980s she worked in support of the South African antiapartheid movement, and in Detroit in 1987 she founded the Rosa and Raymond Rosa Parks Institute for Self-Development, a career counseling center for black youth.

Rosa Parks has received numerous awards and tributes, including the NAACP's highest honor, the Spingarn Medal, in 1970 and the prestigious Martin Luther King, Jr. Award in 1980. Cleveland Avenue in the city of Montgomery was renamed Rosa Rosa Parks Boulevard in 1965. In 1996 U.S. president Bill Clinton awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor that the U.S. government can give to a civilian.

A friend once described Rosa Parks as someone who, as a rule, did not defy authority, but once determined on a course of action, refused to back down: "She might ignore you, go around you, but never retreat.