Rosa Parks was an African American civil rights activist whose arrest in December 1955, for keeping her seat on a segregated city bus in Montgomery, Alabama, set off the Montgomery bus boycott, one of the founding campaigns of the modern civil rights movement in the United States. Far from being simply a tired seamstress, she was an experienced organiser who spent most of her long life campaigning for racial justice.
Growing up under Jim Crow
She was born Rosa Louise McCauley on 4 February 1913 at Tuskegee, Alabama, and grew up with her mother and grandparents on a farm at Pine Level, in a state where segregation was written into law and racist violence was common. She studied in Montgomery but left school to nurse her grandmother and mother. In 1932 she married Raymond Parks, an activist, who encouraged her to finish high school, which she did in 1933. Together they supported the defence of the Scottsboro Boys, nine Black youths falsely accused of rape.
An organiser before 1955
In 1943 she joined the Montgomery branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and was elected its secretary. After two failed attempts she registered to vote in 1945, when barely any Black residents of the city were on the rolls. She investigated cases of racial and sexual violence, notably the 1944 gang rape of Recy Taylor, building a campaign that drew national attention. In the summer of 1955 she attended the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, a training centre for activists.
The arrest
Montgomery's buses kept front rows for white riders, and drivers often ordered Black passengers to give up seats further back. Others, among them the fifteen-year-old Claudette Colvin, had already been arrested for refusing. On 1 December 1955 the driver James F. Blake, who had confronted Parks on his bus in 1943, demanded that the Black passengers in her row stand for white passengers. The others moved; she did not, and was arrested. Local leaders saw her as an ideal test case, and the Women's Political Council called a one-day boycott for 5 December, the day she was tried and fined.
The boycott
That evening the newly formed Montgomery Improvement Association, led by the young pastor Martin Luther King Jr., voted to continue the Montgomery bus boycott. Black residents walked or used car pools for more than a year, despite arrests, threats and violence. Parks lost her job as a seamstress, and her husband lost his too. The boycott ended on 20 December 1956, after 381 days, after the Supreme Court had found the segregation of Montgomery's buses unconstitutional in the case Browder v. Gayle.
Detroit
Facing poverty, ill health and death threats, the Parkses moved to Detroit in 1957. She attended the 1963 March on Washington and the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches, and after John Conyers was elected to Congress in 1964 she worked in his Detroit office. She admired Malcolm X, supported Black Power and campaigned for political prisoners, and in the 1980s joined protests against apartheid, calling in 1990 for the release of Nelson Mandela. In 1987 she co-founded an institute to train young civil rights leaders.
Death and memory
Parks died at home in Detroit on 24 October 2005, aged 92. She lay in state in the rotunda of the United States Capitol, where some 40,000 people filed past, and she was buried in Detroit. Among many honours were the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal.
On our maps
Our 1945 and 1960 maps show the United States in the years when she organised in Montgomery and the boycott took place.
From the atlas
Rosa Parks in time and on the map
Rosa Parks lived from 1913 to 2005. Borders of Time has 9 world maps from those years: 1914, 1920, 1930, 1938, 1945, 1960, 1985, 1994 and 2000.
Living at the same time, among others on this site: Võ Nguyên Giáp (1911–2013), Ronald Reagan (1911–2004), Augusto Pinochet (1915–2006), Nelson Mandela (1918–2013), Pope John Paul II (1920–2005), Deng Xiaoping (1904–1997), Mother Teresa (1910–1997), Suharto (1921–2008), Lee Kuan Yew (1923–2015) and John Rawls (1921–2002).
Events of those years: Indian independence movement (1757–1947), Satsuma Rebellion (1877–2005), Scramble for Africa (1885–1914), Progressive Era (1897–1920), Nahda (1900–2000), Mexican Revolution (1910–1920), New Culture Movement (1910–1920), Balkan Wars (1912–1913), World War I (1914–1918) and Battle of Tannenberg (1914) (1914).
Born just before and after, among others on this site: before, Albert Camus (1913–1960) and Menachem Begin (1913–1992); after, Ferdinand Marcos (1917–1989) and Indira Gandhi (1917–1984).