Civil Rights Movement Famous Figures: Rosa Parks

A seamstress by trade, Rosa Parks was an activist with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) whose refusal in 1955 to surrender her bus seat to a white passenger in Montgomery, Alabama, inaugurated a year-long bus boycott by black residents, propelled the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., to national prominence as a civil rights leader, supplied a blueprint for resisting segregation in the United States, and transformed the American civil rights campaign into a mass movement of national scope.

Born Rosa Louise McCauley on February 14, 1913, in Tuskegee, Alabama, Parks moved, after her parents’ divorce, to Pine Level, Alabama, where she was homeschooled and joined the African Methodist Episcopal Church. At age eleven, she attended the Industrial School for Girls in Montgomery before entering an auxiliary institution of the Alabama State Teachers College for Negroes for secondary instruction. Family illnesses forced her to leave school, and she did not receive her high school diploma until 1933. The previous year she married Raymond Parks, a Montgomery barber and NAACP activist, joined the Montgomery NAACP in December 1943, and served as chapter secretary until 1957.

On December 1, 1955, Parks returned home from her job as a seamstress in a Montgomery department store on a municipal bus. A long-time municipal ordinance mandated segregation on public buses; white passengers enjoyed priority seating, while black passengers would sit, stand, or exit outright according to the placement of a “Colored” sign that limited seating for black passengers. Parks sat in the appropriate section until the number of white passengers exceeded the available seating. Driver James F. Blake then repositioned the “Colored” sign behind Parks and three other black passengers and demanded that they move; Parks alone refused. She was subsequently arrested for disorderly conduct and violating a local ordinance. On December 5, she was tried, convicted, and fined fourteen dollars—a verdict she later appealed.

Local NAACP president Edgar D. Dixon posted Parks's bond and conceived a community-wide boycott of the Montgomery bus system. A citizens’ group called the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) was formed to coordinate the boycott, with local pastor Martin Luther King, Jr., chosen to lead that organization. The boycott began on December 5, 1955, and lasted 381 days, until the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Browder v. Gayle (1956) that municipal bus segregation laws were unconstitutional.

Rosa and Raymond relocated in 1957 to Detroit, where Rosa worked as a seamstress until 1965, when African American U.S. representative John Conyers (D-MI) hired her as a secretary for his local office—a position she retained until her retirement in 1988. Parks spoke extensively, published memoirs in 1992 and 1995, and recaptured national attention in 1999 after the hip-hop music duo OutKast released a song titled “Rosa Parks” without her permission. Parks sued and, after multiple appeals, agreed in 2005 to an undisclosed settlement with the group and its affiliates. Rosa Parks died on October 24, 2005, after a year-long bout with progressive dementia. During the national funeral tribute, her body lay in state under the U.S. Capitol Rotunda in Washington, D.C.; it was the first time a woman was so honored. In February 2013, a life-size bronze statue of the civil rights pioneer was unveiled in the U.S. Capitol to mark her one-hundredth birthday.