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Why do we love Rosa?
Rosa Parks was born Rosa Louise McCauley. Her father was a carpenter and her mother a teacher. At the age of two, she moved to her grandparents' farm with her mother and younger brother, Sylvester. At 11, she enrolled in the Montgomery Industrial School for Girls, a private school with a philosophy of encouraging girls to find and value their self worth. Rosa left school five years later to care for her sick grandmother and, later, her mother. From an early age, Rosa knew the fear of living in a world in which black people had no civil rights and no legal redress. She recalled hearing Klansmen lynch a man as a child and being afraid they would burn her house down.
After attending Alabama State Teachers College, Rosa settled in Montgomery, Alabama, with her husband, Raymond. The couple joined the local chapter of the NAACP and worked to improve the lot of African-Americans in the segregated south. Rosa was elected secretary of the Montgomery chapter in 1943. As secretary, she worked on many cases of murder, floggings, and rape—but even the gravest crimes committed against black people didn't receive much publicity or justice.
The Montgomery buses were segregated, meaning whites and blacks had separate seating—whites in the front, blacks in the back. On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was on her way home from work and was told she had to move from her seat because a white man wanted it. She was seated in the middle section of the bus, designated for use by whites or blacks, depending on how full the white section was. Rosa decided it was time to take a stand for her rights. She simply said No, she would not move. With this refusal, Rosa ignited a civil rights revolution in America. The bus driver had Rosa arrested for refusing to give up her seat and the NAACP used this arrest of a law-abiding, middle-aged married woman to challenge the Montgomery bus segregation laws.
The day after her arrest, the Women's Political Council organized a boycott of the bus system by black riders, leaving Montgomery public buses running empty routes. The NAACP lawyers made sure Rosa Parks lost her case in lower courts so her case could be appealed to higher courts. It went all the way to the United States Supreme Court where, on November 13, 1956, the Supreme Court ruled that the Montgomery bus segregation was unconstitutional. The day the buses were officially desegregated marked the end of the yearlong bus boycott. A major battle for civil rights for blacks had been won; from that point onward Rosa Parks has been a symbol of the civil rights movement and a symbol of personal bravery and conviction.
Since the days of her famous act of defiance, Rosa Parks has lived a sometimes-difficult life. Her celebrity translated into frequent death threats and instant unemployment for her husband and herself in Montgomery. They moved north to Detroit where they struggled financially, a situation that eased when she was hired as an administrative assistant to a black congressional representative in 1965, a post she held for 22 years.
Throughout the years Rosa has remained a committed activist, working on behalf of civil rights in the United States and abroad. In 1987, she founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development, a career counseling center for black youth in Detroit.
Rosa Parks has received numerous awards and tributes, including the NAACP's highest honor, the Spingarn Medal, in 1970, and the prestigious Martin Luther King, Jr. Award in 1980. Cleveland Avenue in the city of Montgomery was renamed Rosa Parks Boulevard in 1965. In 1996, U.S. president Bill Clinton awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor the U.S. government can bestow.
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