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Rosa Park Story

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ROSA PARKS

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks boarded a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Instead of going
to the back of the bus, which was designated for African Americans, she sat in the front.
When the bus started to fill up with white passengers, the bus driver asked Parks to move.
She refused. Her resistance set in motion one of the largest social movements in history, the
Montgomery Bus Boycott.

Rosa Louise McCauley was born on February 4th, 1913 in Tuskegee, Alabama. As a child,
she went to an industrial school for girls and later enrolled at Alabama State Teachers
College for Negroes (present-day Alabama State University). Unfortunately, Parks was
forced to withdraw after her grandmother became ill. Growing up in the segregated South,
Parks was frequently confronted with racial discrimination and violence. She became active
in the Civil Rights Movement at a young age.

Parks married a local barber by the name of Raymond Parks when she was 19. He was
actively fighting to end racial injustice. Together the couple worked with many social justice
organizations. Eventually, Rosa was elected secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

By the time Parks boarded the bus in 1955, she was an established organizer and leader in the
Civil Rights Movement in Alabama. Parks not only showed active resistance by refusing to
move she also helped organize and plan the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Many have tried to
diminish Parks’ role in the boycott by depicting her as a seamstress who simply did not want
to move because she was tired. Parks denied the claim and years later revealed her true
motivation:

“People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true. I was
not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not
old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the
only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”

Parks courageous act and the subsequent Montgomery Bus Boycott led to the integration of
public transportation in Montgomery. Her actions were not without consequence. She was
jailed for refusing to give up her seat and lost her job for participating in the boycott.

After the boycott, Parks and her husband moved to Hampton, Virginia and later permanently
settled in Detroit, Michigan. Parks work proved to be invaluable in Detroit’s Civil Rights
Movement. She was an active member of several organizations which worked to end
inequality in the city. By 1980, after consistently giving to the movement both financially and
physically Parks, now widowed, suffered from financial and health troubles. After almost
being evicted from her home, local community members and churches came together to
support Parks. On October 24th, 2005, at the age of 92, she died of natural causes leaving
behind a rich legacy of resistance against racial discrimination and injustice.

REFERENCE:
Norwood, Arlisha. “Rosa Parks.” National Women’s History Museum (2017). On-line.
World Wide Web. Feb. 20, 2024. Available at https://www.womenshistory.org/education-
resources/biographies/rosa-parks

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