Today is the 55th anniversary of Rosa Parks’ infamous stand sit during the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Her daring refusal to move to the back of the bus was not a decision made lightly because she was simply “too tired.” “The only tired I was,” Parks wrote in Rosa Parks: My Story (1992), “was tired of giving in.” The following short biography of Parks comes from Darlene Clark Hine, editor of Black Women in America.
Parks, Rosa (b. 4 February 1913 ; d. 24 October 2005 ), civil rights activist. From the moment her photograph was first published in newspapers across America, Parks, with her quiet dignity, has been a symbol for the civil rights movement in this country. Those who orchestrated the Montgomery bus boycott bypassed several other women to choose Parks as a representative of all the black women and men who were forced to live with Jim Crow laws and customs in the South, and she lived up to their expectations.
Early Life and Activism
Rosa Louise McCauley was born in Tuskegee, Alabama, the daughter of James McCauley , a carpenter, and Leona Edwards , a teacher. Her father migrated north to find work when Rosa was two years old and did not often communicate with the family after that. Her mother moved Rosa and a younger brother to Pine Level, Alabama, to be nearer her own parents and siblings. In Pine Level, Parks worked as a field hand, in addition to taking care of her grandparents while her mother worked, often as a teacher. Parks’s mother homeschooled her until she was eleven, then sent her to live with her aunt in Montgomery so that she could go to school. While attending the Montgomery Industrial School for Girls, she did household chores for her aunt and also went out to do domestic work outside the home. She attended the Booker T. Washington High School but left before graduation to take care of her mother. Her experience in all these situations left her angry about the injustices in the world, and, when she was nineteen, she met Raymond Parks , a barber who was involved in the civil rights movement. On 19 December 1932 they were married.
The couple did not have children. With her husband’s encouragement, Parks completed her high school education, receiving a diploma in 1934 . From the beginning of their marriage, both were social activists. They worked to secure the release of the Scottsboro Boys, nine black youths accused of raping two white girls. Parks joined the Montgomery Voters League and worked to enfranchise African Americans in the community. During the 1940s she joined the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP and served as secretary of the branch from 1943 until 1956 . Edgar Daniel Nixon Jr. , organizer of the Black Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters Union in Montgomery and head of the Progressive Democrats, was president of the local NAACP chapter.
Particularly good at working with young people, Parks helped train a group of NAACP youths to protest