Rosa Parks
By: Courtney Brown
Quick Description of Rosa Parks
Civil rights activist Rosa Parks refused to to give up her bus seat to a white passenger, she was planning to end the Montgomery boycott and other efforts to end segregation.
Rosa Parks
Civil rights activist Rosa Parks was born on February 4, 1913, in Tuskegee, Alabama. Her refusal to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery, Alabama bus caused chaos in a city-wide boycott. The city of Montgomery had no choice but to lift the law requiring segregation on public buses. Rosa Parks received many accolades during her lifetime, including the NAACP's highest award.
Early Life and Education
Rosa Parks's childhood brought her early experiences with racial discrimination and activism for racial equality. After her parents separated, Rosa's mother moved the family to Pine Level, Alabama to live with her parents, Rose and Sylvester Edwards—both former slaves and strong advocates for racial equality. Rosa was taught to read by her mother at a young age, Rosa went on to attend a segregated, one-room school in Pine Level, Alabama, that often lacked adequate school supplies such as desks. African-American students were forced to walk to the 1st- through 6th-grade schoolhouse, while the city of Pine Level provided bus transportation as well as a new school building for white students. Through the rest of Rosa's education, she attended segregated schools in Montgomery.
Montgomery Bus Boycott
The Montgomery Bus Boycott, in which African Americans refused to ride city buses in Montgomery, Alabama, to protest segregated seating, took place from December 5, 1955, to December 20, 1956, and this is the first huge demonstration against segregation in the U.S. On December 1, 1955, four days before the boycott began, Rosa Parks, an African-American woman, refused to yield her seat to a white man on a Montgomery bus. She was arrested and fined. The boycott of public buses by blacks in Montgomery began on the day of Parks’ court hearing and lasted 381 days. The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately ordered Montgomery to integrate its bus system, and one of the leaders of the boycott, a young pastor named Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-68), emerged as a prominent national leader of the American civil rights movement in the wake of the action.
5 Facts abut Rosa Parks
1. She was born on February 4, 1913 in Tuskegee, Alabama, U.S.A
2. She was an African-American civil rights activist
3. In recognition of her work the U.S. Congress called her "the first lady of civil rights" and "the mother of the freedom movement"
4. Her involvement in th eMontgomery Bus Boycott is her most notable action
5. She died on October 24, 2005 in Detroit, Michigan, U.S.A aged 92