Rosa Louise Parks was an African-American civil rights
activist born in Tuskegee, Alabama on February 4, 1913. She attended Alabama
State Teachers College. She held a
variety of jobs and in 1943 she became one of the first women to join the
Montgomery Chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People (NAACP). She served as the
organization's secretary.
Parks was arrested for breaking a city law requiring
that whites and blacks sit in separate rows on buses. She refused to give up her seat to a white man who wanted to
sit in her row. The law required blacks to leave their seats in the next rows
when all seats in the front rows were taken and other whites still wanted seats.
Even before Rosa's arrest, Montgomery's black leaders
had been planning protest against racial segregation on the city's buses. Rosa
allowed the leaders to use her arrest to spark a boycott of the bus system.
The leaders formed an organization to run the boycott.
Martin Luther King Jr. was chosen as president. For about 400 days, many
blacks refused to ride Montgomery's buses. Their boycott ended when the Supreme
Court declared segregated seating on the city's buses unconstitutional.
The boycott's success encouraged other mass protests demanding civil
rights for blacks.
Parks lost her job as a seamstress as a result of the
Montgomery boycott. She moved to
Detroit in worked on the Detroit staff of John Conyers Jr., a Democratic member
of the House of Representatives. In
1979, she won the Spingarn Medal for her work in civil rights.