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Rosa Parks was born
Rosa McCauley on February 4, 1913 in Tuskegee, Alabama. Her
father was a carpenter and her mother, a teacher. She moved
to Pine Level, Alabama with her mother and brother, to live
with her grandparents. She didn't have many luxuries in her
life but the family got by on what they had.
Rosa graduated from
high school and attended Alabama State College in
Montgomery, Alabama. In 1932, Rosa married Raymond Parks, a
barber. Rosa and her husband were active in civil rights
causes such as voter registration for blacks. She worked for
the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People (NAACP) Youth Council.
In those days,
public places and schools were segregated by race. There
were sections for African Americans and sections for whites.
They had separate schools and churches. Even on city buses,
blacks were required to sit in the back. If the front, white
section filled up, blacks were asked to give up their seats
to white people. Some bus drivers even demanded that blacks
step into the bus to pay their fare, which was equal to a
white person's fare, and then step back out and enter the
back door so that they would not pass through the white
section to get to their seats.
Rosa worked many
different jobs such as housekeeper, insurance saleswoman and
seamstress. Working as a tailor's assistant for the
Montgomery Fair department store in 1955, Parks found
herself in the spotlight. Late at night on December 1st, she
was heading home from work. She got on the bus and sat one
row behind the white section. She was asked to give up her
seat to a white person. Rosa refused and the bus driver
stopped the bus, brought in some policemen and had her taken
to the police headquarters.
The United States
Supreme Court had recently made a decision on a case
entitled Brown vs. Board of Education making it
illegal for schools to be segregated. So, African American
organizations decided that Rosa's protest could be the start
they were looking for to fight segregation. They asked
Montgomery's African Americans to stop riding the buses in
protest until the company was willing to change their rules,
plus hire black drivers.
They formed a group
called the Montgomery Improvement Association and elected
Martin Luther King, Jr. to be the president. The boycott
went on for 380 days. When the case went to court they won
and segregation on the Montgomery buses was ended on
December 20, 1956.
In 1957, Rosa and
her family decided to move to Detroit, Michigan because they
had been fired from their jobs for protesting. They
continued to have problems finding jobs but Rosa was hired
by Congressman John Conyers as his receptionist and went on
to work there for 25 years. She also continued her work with
the NAACP and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
She was in demand as a public speaker.
Rosa Parks went on
to receive many awards some of which were:
- honorary degree
from Shaw College in Detroit, Michigan
- Freedom Award
from the SCLC
- Martin Luther
King, Jr. Nonviolent Peace Prize (1980)
- Eleanor
Roosevelt Women of Courage Award (1984)
- Congressional
Gold Medal (1999)
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