Civil Rights

Rosa Louise McCauley Parks (February 4, 1913 – October 24, 2005) was an African American civil rights activist whom the U.S. Congress later called the "Mother of the Modern-Day Civil Rights Movement."On December 1, 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, Parks, age 42, refused to obey bus driver James Blake's order that she give up her seat to make room for a white passenger. Her action was not the first of its kind: Irene Morgan, in 1946, and Sarah Louise Keys, in 1955, had won rulings before the U.S. Supreme Court and the Interstate Commerce Commission respectively in the area of interstate bus travel. Nine months before Parks refused to give up her seat, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin refused to move from her seat on the same bus system. But unlike these previous individual actions of civil disobedience, Parks' action sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott.Parks' act of defiance became an important symbol of the modern Civil Rights Movement and Parks became an international icon of resistance to racial segregation. She organized and collaborated with civil rights leaders, including boycott leader Martin Luther King, Jr., helping to launch him to national prominence in the civil rights movement.

Rosa Parks did not intend to get arrested as she made her way home from work on December 1, 1955. Little did the 42-year-old seamstress know that an act of hers soon would make her a pivotal symbol of the civil rights movement and help end segregation laws in the South. That same day, a group of African Americans founded the Montgomery Improvement Association and named the young pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church -- the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. -- as its leader, and a bus boycott was begun. For the next 381 days, African-Americans -- who, according to Time magazine, had made up two-thirds of Montgomery bus riders -- boycotted public transportation to protest Parks' arrest and, in turn, segregation laws. The mass movement marked one of the largest and most successful challenges of segregation and catapulted King to the forefront of the civil rights movement. The boycott ended on November 13, 1956, after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling that Montgomery's segregrated bus service was unconstitutional. Parks, facing regular threats and having lost her job, moved from Alabama to Michigan in 1957. She joined the staff of U.S. Rep. John Conyers, D-Michigan, in 1965, championing civil liberties. Parks later earned the Presidential Medal of Freedom and Congressional Gold Medal. Now 90, Parks was the subject of the documentary "Mighty Times: The Legacy of Rosa Parks," which received a 2002 Oscar nomination for best documentary short.