Rosa Parks 1913 – 2005

Biography

Rosa Parks changed the course of American history with a single act of refusal. On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, she declined to give up her bus seat to a white passenger, defying the Jim Crow segregation laws of the day. Her arrest sparked the Montgomery bus boycott, a 381-day protest that became one of the defining campaigns of the civil rights movement and thrust a young Martin Luther King Jr. into national leadership. Parks, a longtime NAACP activist, became known as the ‘mother of the civil rights movement,’ a title she carried with quiet dignity for the rest of her life. She died on October 24, 2005, at the age of 92, remembered not for one moment of defiance alone but for a lifetime of standing her ground.