Rosa Parks—A Hero of Civil Rights

Most historians say that the beginning of the modern civil rights movement in the United States was December 1, 1955. That was the day when an unknown seamstress in Montgomery, Alabama refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger. This brave woman, Rosa Parks, was arrested and fined for violating a city law. However, her act of defiance began a movement that ended the laws that racially segregated America. Because of this, she also became an inspiration to freedom-loving people everywhere.

Rosa Parks was born on February 4, 1913 in Tuskegee, Alabama. Her parents, James McCauley, a carpenter, and Leona McCauley, a teacher, named her Rosa Louise McCauley. When she was two, she moved to her grandparents' farm in Alabama with her mother and younger brother, Sylvester. At the age of 11, she became a student at the Montgomery Industrial School for Girls, a private school. The school believed that self-esteem was the key to success. This was consistent with Rosa's mother's advice to "take advantage of the opportunities, no matter how few they were."

And the opportunities were few indeed. Mrs. Parks said in an interview: Back then, we didn't have any civil rights. It was just a matter of survival, of existing from one day to the next. I remember going to sleep as a girl hearing the Klan ride at night and hearing a lynching and being afraid the house would burn down.

In the same interview, she explained that she felt fearless, because she had always been faced with fear. This fearlessness gave her the courage to fight her conviction during the bus boycott. "I didn't have any special fear," she said. "It was more of a relief to know that I wasn't alone."

After attending Alabama State Teachers College, Rosa settled in Montgomery, with her husband, Raymond Parks. The couple joined the local chapter of the NAACP and worked for many years to improve the conditions of African-Americans in the segregated South.

The bus incident led to the formation of the Montgomery Improvement Association. The Association's leader was a young pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church named Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. They called for a boycott of the city-owned bus company. The boycott lasted 382 days and brought recognition to Mrs. Parks, Dr. King, and their cause. A Supreme Court decision struck down the Montgomery law under which Mrs. Parks had been fined, and outlawed racial segregation on public transportation.

After her husband died, Mrs. Parks founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development. The Institute sponsors an annual summer program for teenagers called Pathways to Freedom. The young people tour the country in buses learning the history of their country and of the civil rights movement.