Parks, Rosa

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Parks, Rosa

February 4, 1913

Civil rights leader Rosa Louise McCauley was born in Tuskegee, Alabama. She lived with relatives in Montgomery, where she finished high school in 1933 and attended Alabama State College. She met her husband, Raymond Parks, a barber, and they married in 1932. Rosa Parks worked as a clerk, an insurance salesperson, and a tailor's assistant at a department store. She was also employed at the time as a part-time seamstress by Virginia and Clifford Durr, two white residents of Montgomery who were staunch supporters of the black freedom struggle.

Parks had been active in civil rights work since the 1930s. She and her husband supported the Scottsboro defendants, a notorious case in which nine young black men were convicted in 1931 on questionable evidence of raping two white women. In 1943 Parks became one of the first women to join the Montgomery NAACP. She worked as a youth adviser, served as secretary for the local group from 1943 to 1956, and helped operate the joint office of the NAACP and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. In addition, she worked with the Montgomery Voters League to increase black voter registration. During the summer of 1955, with the encouragement of the Durrs, Parks accepted a scholarship for a workshop for community leaders on school integration at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee. It was an important experience for Parks, not only for the practical skills of organizing and mobilizing she learned but because the racial harmony she experienced there nurtured and sustained her activism.

Popularly known as the mother of the civil rights movement, Parks is best known for her refusal to give up her seat for a white man on a segregated bus in Montgomery on December 1, 1955, an incident that sparked the Montgomery bus boycott. Contrary to popular belief, Parks was not simply a tired woman who wanted to rest her feet, unaware of the chain of events she was about to trigger. As she wrote in Rosa Parks: My Story (1992), "the only tired I was, was tired of giving in." Parks was a veteran of civil rights activity and was aware of efforts by the Women's Political Council and the local NAACP to find an incident with which they could address segregation in Montgomery.

Parks was actively involved in sustaining the boycott and for a time served on the executive committee of the Montgomery Improvement Association, an organization created to direct the boycott. The intransigence of the city council was met by conviction and fortitude on the part of African Americans. For over a year, black people in Montgomery carpooled, took taxis, and walked to work. The result was a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court that segregation on city buses was unconstitutional.

As a result of her involvement in the bus boycott, Parks lost her job at the department store in Montgomery. In 1957 she and her husband moved to Detroit, where she worked as a seamstress for eight years before becoming administrative assistant for Congressman John Conyers, a position she held until 1988. After she moved to Detroit, Parks continued to be active in the civil rights movement and joined the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). She participated in numerous marches and rallies, including the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery.

In the mid-1980s Parks supported the Free South Africa movement and walked the picket lines in Washington, D.C., with other anti-apartheid activists. She has made countless public appearances, speaking out on political issues as well as giving oral history lessons about the civil rights movement. In 1987, ten years after the death of her husband, she cofounded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development in Detroit, a center committed to career training for black youth. The institute, a dream of hers, was created to address the dropout rate of black youth.

Parks, an international symbol of African-American strength, has been given numerous awards and distinctions, including ten honorary degrees. In 1979 she was awarded the NAACP's prestigious Spingarn Medal. In 1980 she was chosen by Ebony readers as the living black woman who had done the most to advance the cause of black America. In the same year she was awarded the Martin Luther King Jr. Nonviolent Peace Prize by the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change. In addition, the SCLC has honored her by sponsoring the annual Rosa Parks Freedom award.

During the 1990s Parks assumed an increasing role as African-American elder statesperson. She wrote three books, including an autobiography and a book of letters that were written to her from children around the world. In 1996, though confined to a wheelchair, she spoke at the Million Man March. In July 1999 the U.S. Congress awarded Parks the Congressional Gold Medal of Honor, the nation's highest civilian award. Parks's legacy lives on in Troy State University in Montgomery, Alabama, where a library and museum were dedicated in her name in 2000. One year later the Rosa Parks Initiative began in Detroit, with a goal to build an $8 million monument, complete with one million roses and an interactive history of the civil rights movement, in Detroit's Belle Isle Park.

In 1999 Parks initiated a lawsuit against hip-hop duo Outkast. After first being dismissed by a federal judge, an appeals court allowed Parks to proceed with the lawsuit, in which she claimed that Outkast used her name without permission on a 1998 track. Former Detroit Mayor Dennis Archer was appointed by a federal judge to serve as a temporary, independent guardian for Parks in 2004, to ensure that Parks, suffering from dementia, was fairly represented in such matters of litigation.

Bibliography

Brown, Roxanne. "Mother of the Movement." Ebony (February 1988): 68–72.

Garrow, David, ed. The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It: The Memoir of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987.

Parks, Rosa. Rosa Parks: My Story. New York: Dial Books, 1992.

Parks, Rosa. Quiet Strength: The Faith, the Hope, and the Heart of a Woman Who Changed a Nation. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1994.

Parks, Rosa. Dear Mrs. Parks: A Dialogue with Today's Youth. New York: Lee & Low Books, 1996.

premilla nadasen (1996)
Updated by publisher 2005

Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History