Rosa Parks is often called "the first lady of civil rights" and "the mother of the civil rights movement." She was born Rosa McCauley in Tuskegee, Alabama. In this region of the U.S.A. there were laws that guaranteed separate AND unequal facilities and opportunities for the African American citizens. Her father was a carpenter and her mother was a teach in a one-room rural schoolhouse. Early in her life she moved often because her mother and father separated and the family then lived with different relatives around Alabama. They finally settled in Montgomery Parks where Rosa would attend the Montgomery Industrial School, where she learned vocational skills such as sewing, cooking, and embroidery. She then went on to high school, but often had to quit to nurse her ill mother and grandmother.
In 1932 Rosa married a man by the name of Raymond Parks. Raymond was a barber and a civil rights activist. While trying to finish up high school she sold insurance and mended clothes to make money. In 1934 she finally succeeded in receiving her high school diploma. Parks noticed that the "whites" treated the African American citizens very poorly, often accusing them of causing trouble. She eventually decided to join the NAACP, later moving on to become the secretary of the Montgomery chapter.
It was on a normal day, while she was returning home from her job as a seamstress, that Rosa made history. She was riding the bus home when some "white" people got on the bus. There was not enough seats, so Rosa was told to give up her seat so that the "whites" could sit down. She refused to leave her seat...she had just as much right to it as anyone else. The driver of the bus called the police and they came and arrested Rosa for violating a transportation law.
She was taken to jail and then released on a hundred dollar bail. A trial was scheduled for Monday, December 5. Over the weekend several thousand people came to protest the arrest of Rosa. This gathering of people led to the organization of the Montgomery Improvement Association which Martin Luther King Jr. became the president of. To continue the protest, King called a one-day bus boycott. When Rosa was found guilty in her trial and fined $10, the boycott continued. She refused to pay the fine and appealed to a higher court.
Finally in 1956, the United States District Court said that segregated buses were unconstitutional. The Supreme Court upheld the decision and demanded that Montgomery buses be desegregated. The whole process took 381 days, in which African Americans in Montgomery did not ride city buses.
This event led to the beginning of the civil rights movement that was predominately led by Martin Luther King Jr. Rosa Parks and her husband moved to Detroit. She was given many honors for her strength and persistence, including the Spingarn Medal, the Martin Luther King Jr. Nonviolent Peace Prize, and being honored by Ebony magazine as the living black woman that had contributed the most to the advance of civil rights.
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