Rosa Parks

Biography

Rosa Louise McCauley was born in Tuskegee, Alabama, in 1913 and grew up in Pine Level under Jim Crow segregation. She attended the Montgomery Industrial School for Girls and a laboratory school run by the Alabama State Teachers College for Negroes, but left to care for her ailing grandmother and mother. In 1932 she married Raymond Parks.

In 1943 she joined the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP and that December was elected its secretary. She registered to vote in 1945 at her third attempt, and as secretary she investigated racial and sexual violence, helping in 1944 to organise a national campaign for justice for Recy Taylor. In the summer of 1955 she attended the Highlander Folk School, an activist training centre in Tennessee.

On 1 December 1955 she was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus. Local leaders took up her case as a test of segregation, and a one-day boycott called for the day of her trial grew into a 381-day campaign that ended after the courts struck down bus segregation in Browder v. Gayle.

Facing harassment and hardship, Parks moved to Detroit in 1957. After helping John Conyers win election to Congress in 1964 she worked in his Detroit office as a secretary and receptionist. She joined the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches, supported the anti-apartheid movement and took part in the 1995 Million Man March. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal, and after her death in Detroit in 2005 she lay in state in the Capitol rotunda.