Rosa Parks was born on February 4, 1913 in Tuskegee, Alabama.  Her parents were divorced and she moved with her mother to her  randmother and grandfather's home in Pine Levelm Alabama.  She witnessed her grandfather stand in front of their home with a shotgun as the Ku Klux Klan marched down the street.  She attended school in a one room school house where she was forced to walk to school while the white children rode the bus.

 

In 1929 during her eleventh year of school, she had to drop out to attend to her sick grandmother.  She never went back to school instead she took a job at a shirt factory in Montgomery, Alabama.

She married in 1932, and with the support of her husband, she earned her high school degree.  She also joined the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.  She was the secretary to NAACP President E.D. Nixon until 1957.

 

All transportation in Montgomery had to be segregated and the bus drivers had the power of the police to carry out the code.  This meant blacks rode in the back of the bus, and whites in the front.  If the bus was full, black passengers were asked to give up their seats for the whites.

 

On December 1, 1955 after a long day at work, Rosa Parks boarded the bus for home.  She sat in the designated seats for blacks.  The bus began to fill up and the driver noticed several whites standing.  He stopped the bus and moved the area for the colored passengers back further.  Four black passengers were asked to give up their seats, three did and Rosa refused.  The bus driver called police and she was arrested.  She stated she was tired of giving in.

 

On the evening of her arrest, E.D. Nixon formed a plan for blacks to boycott Montgomery's city buses.  He asked them to not ride the buses until after Rosa's trial, in protest of her arrest.  

 

On the morning of her trial she was greeted by some five hundred supporters.  She was fined $10 and a $4 court fee.  The Montgomery Bus Boycott as it was known was a huge success.  Montgomery had no choice but to lift the segregation law.

 

She suffered hardships by becoming a member of the civil rights movement.  Her husband was fired from his job and she lost hers as well.  She moved to Detroit, Michigan and made a new life for herself.  She became secretary and receptionist for U.S. Representative John Conyer.  She also served on the board of Planned Parenthood.  She founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development.  She also published Rosa Parks: My Story, and autobiography.

 

Rosa received the Martin Luther King award, the Spingarn Medal from the NAACP, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal.  She died on October 24, 2005 at the age of 92.