Rosa Parks was born Rosa Louise McCauley in Tuskegee, Alabama, on February 4, 1913. When she was 11, her family moved to Montgomery, where she attended high school through the Alabama State Teachers’ College for Negroes. She dropped out of school at the age of 16 to care for her grandmother and her mother. When she was 19, she married Raymond Parks, who was a member of the NAACP. After returning to school to earn her high school diploma, she began working as a seamstress, and she rose to the position of secretary in the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP in 1943 (“Rosa Parks”).
Parks is best known for her act of protest on December 1, 1955, when she was riding a city bus home from her job at the Montgomery Fair department store. The city law in Montgomery mandated that African-Americans yield seats near the front of the bus to a white riders, but when the bus driver called on Parks to vacate her seat and move to the back of the bus, she refused. As a result, she was arrested. Although she was not the first African-American to protest the law in this way, her act of protest and subsequent arrest gained widespread attention in Montgomery because of her position in the NAACP (“An Act of Courage”). Thus, it fueled the energy of the African-American community in Montgomery to stage the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Indeed, the bus boycott began in earnest on December 5, 1955, the day of Parks’ trial. Over the course of 381 days, Parks worked closely with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to organize the ongoing boycott (NCC Staff). King was only 26 at the time, and the success of the Montgomery Bus Boycott contributed to his rise to prominence on the national stage. Thus, it can be argued that Rosa Parks’ hand in the civil rights movement extended beyond the Montgomery Bus Boycott, because she supported Dr. King as he made the civil rights movement a national issue (“An Act of Courage”).
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Parks’ action also had a direct effect on the overturning of Montgomery’s discriminatory bus seating law. Although her case ended up getting caught up in the state courts, lawyers from the NAACP pursued the case of four other women who had followed in her footsteps and refused to yield their seats on the bus. On November 13, 1956, the Supreme Court ruled that the segregated bus laws in Alabama were illegal under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th amendment (NCC Staff). Not only did this establish important legal precedent, but it also boosted the profile of NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall, who would eventually become the first African-American justice on the Supreme Court. Again, it is important to recognize that Rosa Parks’ small act played a role in these much larger changes in the American legal system.
Shortly after the Montgomery Bus Boycott ended, Rosa Parks moved to Detroit, Michigan. There, she supported the election of Democrat John Conyers to the House of Representatives, and she was hired to work in his district office in 1965, where she remained until she retired in 1988 (Ziv). In this position, she made a difference by supporting many of the progressive actions that Conyers took, including co-founding the Congressional Black Caucus in 1969 and introducing the bill that made Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a national holiday (Gray). She also made a difference on the local stage when she cofounded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development, an organization committed to supporting the success of youth in Detroit and continuing ongoing efforts to promote civil rights (“Rosa Parks”).
When Rosa Parks died in 2005, the nation responded with an outpouring of respect, and Congress agreed to honor her by holding a public viewing of her coffin in the Capitol Rotunda. She was the first woman ever to receive this honor, and only the thirtieth person in United States history (NCC Staff). Considering the significant influence she had on the civil rights movement in the United States – from her involvement in the Montgomery Bus Boycott to her work in the office of a Congress member – this honor was certainly warranted.
- “An Act of Courage, the Arrest Records of Rosa Parks.” National Archives, 21 December 2016, https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/rosa-parks.
- Gray, Kathleen. “U.S. Rep John Conyers Leaves Behind Legacy of Civil Rights, Racial Justice.” Detroit Free Press, 5 December 2017, https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/detroit/2017/12/05/john-conyers-legacy-racial/923724001/.
- NCC Staff. “On This Day, Rosa Parks Wouldn’t Give Up Her Bus Seat.” National Constitution Center, 1 December 2017, https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/it-was-on-this-day-that-rosa-parks-made-history-by-riding-a-bus.
- “Rosa Parks.” History.com, 2018, http://www.history.com/topics/black-history/rosa-parks.
- Ziv, Stav. “What the Rosa Parks Archive Reveals About a Civil Rights Hero.” Newsweek, 7 February 2015, http://www.newsweek.com/what-rosa-parks-archive-reveals-about-civil-rights-hero-305141.
