Who Was Rosa Parks

Rosa Parks is an icon of the American civil rights movement, known for her refusal to give up her bus seat to a white passenger in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955. Parks’ brave act sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which precipitated a series of events that ultimately led to the end of segregation in the South.

Rosa Parks was born Rosa Louise McCauley on February 4, 1913 in Tuskegee, Alabama. The youngest of both her parents’ children, she worked as a housekeeper to help support her family, which was barely surviving during the Great Depression. As a young girl, Parks experienced discrimination in the Jim Crow South – when she was six-years-old, she had to walk miles to school because the buses were not segregated.

Parks attended the Montgomery Industrial School for Girls to pursue a career in teaching, and while there, she married Raymond Parks, a barber who was active in the NAACP, in 1932. In 1943, after working several different positions, Parks took a job as a seamstress in an NAACP-sponsored department store, where she met Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and other civil-rights activists.

In 1955, Parks’ refusal to give up her seat sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which lasted for 381 days – the power of protest had won a major victory for civil rights activists. After her bravery, Parks became a symbol of race and class indiscriminately, and was touted a civil rights heroine.

In her later years, Parks became increasingly focused on education. She moved to Detroit in 1957, where she helped establish the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development and achieved various awards including the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal, both of which she was personally presented with by President Bill Clinton.

Rosa Parks died in Detroit on October 24, 2005 – but her legacy remains to this day. She is remembered as one of the most influential people of the 20th century and an enduring symbol of racial justice.