Rosa Parks

At 92 years old, Rosa Parks has this physical status:

Rosa Louise McCauley Parks (February 4, 1913 – October 24, 2005) was an American feminist activist best known for her pivotal role in the Montgomery bus boycott.

After the whites-only section was full, the United States Congress has referred to her as "the first lady of civil rights" and "the mother of the freedom movement."

Parks was not the first person to protest bus segregation, but the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) believed she was the best candidate for facing a court challenge after her detention for civil obedience in breaching Alabama segregation laws.

Parks' prominence in the community and her willingness to become a controversial figure prompted the black community to boycott the Montgomery buses for more than a year, the first major direct action campaign of the post-war civil rights movement.

Her case became entangled in the state courts, but Browder vs. Gayle, a federal Montgomery bus boycott, became one of the movement's most notable figures.

She became a worldwide symbol of opposition to racial discrimination.

Early life

Rosa Louise McCauley, a teacher and James McCauley, a carpenter, was born in Tuskegee, Alabama, on February 4, 1913. One of Parks' great-grandfathers, Scots-Irish, and one of her great-grandmothers was a part-Native American slave, in addition to African descent. She was a child and had poor health as a result of chronic tonsillitis. When her parents separated, she and her mother moved to Pine Level, just outside Montgomery's state capital. She and her maternal grandparents, mother, and younger brother Sylvester grew up on a farm. They were all members of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), a century-old independent Black denomination founded by free Blacks in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in the early nineteenth century.

McCauley attended rural schools until the age of eleven. "A good deal about sewing" was taught her mother before that. She started piecing quilts as her mother and grandmother were sewing quilts, but it was unusual to stitch her first quilt together by herself around the age of ten, since quilting was mainly a family hobby. She learned more sewing in school from the age of eleven; she sewed her own "first dress [she] could wear." She attended academic and vocational courses as a student at the Industrial School for Girls in Montgomery. Parks moved to a laboratory school established by the Alabama State Teachers College for Negroes for secondary education, but she was forced to care for her grandmother and later her mother after they became sick.

Around the twentieth century, Confederate states had passed new constitutions and electoral laws that effectively disenfranchised Black voters, and, in Alabama, many poor White voters have joined as well. In public buildings and retail stores in the South, including public transportation, under the White-established Jim Crow laws, which came after Democrats regained control of southern legislatures. With separate sections for Blacks and Whites, bus and train companies followed seating rules. In the South, school bus transportation was always underfunded, and black schoolchildren were never adequately funded.

Parks returned to elementary school in Pine Level, where school buses carried White students to their new school, and Black students had to walk to their classrooms.

Although Parks' autobiography recalls early experiences of the kindness of White strangers, she was unable to ignore her culture's bigotry. Parks remembers her grandfather was guarding the front door with a shotgun as the Ku Klux Klan marched down the street in front of their house. Arsonists burned the Montgomery Industrial School, which was established and operated by White northerners for Black students. The White community ostracized Its faculty.

White girls in her neighborhood were consistently bullied by White children, and parks often fought back physically. "I could never think in terms of accepting physical assault without any sort of retaliation," she said later.

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Rosa Parks, a barber from Montgomery, married Raymond Parks, a barber from 1932. He was born on June 15, 15, He was a member of the NAACP, which at the time was raising funds to help the Scottsboro Boys, a group of Black men falsely accused of assaulting two White women. Rosa (6890) had a variety of jobs, ranging from domestic worker to hospital aide. She completed her high school studies in 1933, at a time when only 7% of African Americans had a high school diploma, at her husband's behest.

Parks became involved in the civil rights movement in December 1943, became involved in the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP, and was elected secretary at a time when women's work was still considered a woman's occupation. "I was the only woman there, and they wanted a secretary, and I was too timid to say no." She served as secretary until 1957. "Women don't have to be somewhere but in the kitchen," she told local NAACP leader Edgar Nixon, who maintained that "Women don't have to be nowhere but in the kitchen."

When Parks asked, "Well, what about me?

"I need a secretary and you are a natural one," the narrator replied.

Recy Taylor, a Black woman from Abbeville, Alabama, was arrested in 1944, while serving as secretary. "The Committee for Equal Justice for Mrs. Recy Taylor," a civil rights campaign launched in Chicago, was launched by parks and other civil rights campaigners. "The Committee for Equal Justice for Mrs. Recy Taylor" was the first campaign for equal justice in a decade, according to the Chicago Defender. Parks continued her activism as an anti-rape campaign five years later when she helped organize protests in favor of Gertrude Perkins, a Black woman who was assaulted by two White Montgomery police officers.

Despite being not a member of the Communist Party, she attended meetings with her husband. The Communist Party had brought the notorious Scottsboro case to prominence.

Parks and her husband became members of the League of Women Voters in the 1940s. She worked at Maxwell Air Force Base, which, despite its Montgomery, Alabama location, didn't allow racial discrimination because it was federal property. She rode on its own trolley. "You might just say Maxwell opened my eyes up," Parks said while speaking to her biographer. Parks was a housekeeper and seamstress for Clifford and Virginia Durr, a White couple. The Durrs became her friends, who were characterized as politically liberal. Parks were encouraged — and later sponsored — in Monteagle, Tennessee, by the Highlander Folk School, an education center for worker rights and racial equality. Septima Clark, a veteran organizer, coached There Parks. Despite Jim Crow's and registrar discrimination, she was able to vote on her third attempt in 1945.

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Emmett Till, a black teenager from August 1955, was brutally murdered after reportedly flirting with a young White woman while visiting relatives in Mississippi. Rosa Parks attended a mass meeting in Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery on November 27, 1955, four days before she would make her public appearance on the bus, as well as the recent murders of the activists George W. Lee and Lamar Smith. T. R. M. Howard, a Black civil rights leader from Mississippi who served on the Regional Council of Negro Leadership, was the featured speaker. Howard revealed that the two men who had murdered Till were cleared of the murder charge. Parks were deeply saddened and angered at the news, particularly because Till's case drew much more attention than any of the ones she and the Montgomery NAACP had litigated on—and yet, the two men walked free.

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