From an early age, Rosa McCauley
Parks
was aware of the injustices of segregation in Alabama.
She had heard stories of a successful
boycott that had achieved
integration on Montgomery’s
trolley system in 1900. As
she watched
segregated buses ride past her each d ay, she was reminded of the
injustice of a
system that forced African-Americans to pay their fare to a white
driver at the
front of the bus, then exit the bus and board in the black section at
the
back. This
indignity led her to stand up
for the rights of African-Americans by sitting down and refusing to
give up her
seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery, Alabama bus.
Rosa Louise McCauley was born in Tuskegee, Alabama,
in 1913. She
attended the Montgomery
Industrial
School
for Girls and settled in Montgomery
after she
married Raymond Parks. The
couple
joined the Montgomery
chapter of the NAACP in 1942 and Rosa Parks served as state secretary
for the
organization in 1947. In the summer of 1955, Mrs. Parks attended a
citizenship training course at the Highlander
Folk
School
in Tennessee,
where she learned more about non-violent direct action as a means of
protesting
violations of her own and others' civil rights.
On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, then
42 years old, refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus
to a white passenger. While
it is commonly said that she was tired
after a long day of work as a seamstress at a Montgomery
department store, Parks often said
that she was tired of being denied her rights.
Her non-violent direct action protest,
and her subsequent arrest, led to
the creation of the Montgomery Improvement Association, which would be
led by
Martin Luther King, Jr., a new preacher to the Montgomery area. The MIA, along with the
Women’s Political
Council, launched the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which lasted 381 days and
led to
the end of racial segregation on the city’s buses.
A
long-time advocate of social justice, Parks’ actions
sparked the modern Civil Rights Movement, leading to her designation as
the
“Mother of the Civil Rights Movement.” Rosa Parks was
named one of the “100 Most
Influential People of the 20th
Century” by Time Magazine. She also
received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1996 and the
Congressional Gold
Medal in 1999. An
advocate for civil and
human rights, she established the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for
Self-Development. After
her death in
2005 at the age of 92, Parks became the first woman and the second
African-American to lie in state in the rotunda of the
nation’s capitol. Rosa
Parks was a woman of silent dignity and
grace whose life changed the state, the nation and the world |
Past Inductees
