Facts about Rosa Parks
15. By refusing to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery, Alabama, city bus in 1955, black seamstress Rosa Parks (1913—2005) helped initiate the civil rights movement in the United States.
14. Rosa grew up in the southern United States in Alabama.
13. Birth date: February 4, 1913. Death date: October 24, 2005
12. The boycott was a success and led to desegregation in Montgomery and elsewhere in the United States.
11. She was of African, Cherokee-Creek, and Scots-Irish ancestry.
10. Her parents are James and Leona McCauley
9. Parks had been thrown off the bus a decade earlier by the same bus driver.
8. Grew up on a small farm with her brother, mother, and grandparents.
7. Rosa attended segregated schools throughout her childhood, which meant a long daily walk to the African American school house she attended, while the white students in her community rode a bus to a large, new building.
6. She was highly honored for her part, in 1979 she won the Spingarn Medal; she won the Congressional Gold Medal; she is honored in a posthumous statue in the United States Capitol’s National Statuary Hall; and was given the posthumous honor of lying at the Capitol Rotunda.
5. Parks became a nationally recognized symbol of dignity and strength in the struggle to end entrenched racial segregation.
4. A few years later Rosa met Raymond Parks. Raymond was a successful barber who worked in Montgomery. They married a year later in 1932.
3. She attended the private all-black Montgomery Industrial School for Girls in Pine Level, Alabama, and the Alabama State Teachers College high school, which is now Alabama State University.
2. Parks worked as an aide to Michigan Congressman John Conyers, Jr. from 1966 until her retirement in 1988, and she founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development in 1987.
1. She was a member of the African Methodist Episcopal church.
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