Rosa Parks

Rosa Parks was an American civil rights activist who helped change the laws that kept Black and white Americans separated. She lived from 1913 to 2005. Her quiet act of refusing to give up her seat on a bus in 1955 helped start one of the most important protests in American history. People later called her "the mother of the civil rights movement."

She was born Rosa Louise McCauley in Tuskegee, Alabama. She grew up on her grandparents' small farm. As a child, she watched her grandfather sit by the door at night with a shotgun to protect the family from the Ku Klux Klan. In 1932, she married Raymond Parks, a barber who worked for civil rights causes. Rosa joined too. She became the secretary of the local NAACP, a group that fought for the rights of Black Americans.

In the 1950s, Alabama had laws called Jim Crow laws. These laws kept Black people separated from white people in schools, restaurants, and even on buses. On Montgomery city buses, Black riders had to sit in the back. If the white section filled up, they had to give up their seats and stand.

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was riding home from her job as a seamstress. The driver told her to give up her seat to a white passenger. She said no. The police arrested her and took her to jail.

People often say Parks stayed seated because her feet were tired. She said that was not true. "The only tired I was, was tired of giving in," she wrote later.

Her arrest sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott. For 381 days, Black residents of Montgomery refused to ride the city buses. They walked, carpooled, and took taxis instead. A young minister named Martin Luther King Jr. helped lead the protest. The bus company lost a huge amount of money. In 1956, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that bus segregation was against the Constitution.

Parks paid a price for her courage. She lost her job and could not find work in Montgomery. She and her husband moved to Detroit, Michigan. She worked for years in the office of Congressman John Conyers and kept fighting for civil rights for the rest of her life.

When Rosa Parks died in 2005 at age 92, her body was placed in the U.S. Capitol so the public could honor her. She was the first woman ever given that honor. A bronze statue of her now sits in the Capitol, showing her on a bus seat, refusing to stand.