Rosa Parks (English Homework)

Called "the mother of the civil rights movement," Rosa Parks invigorated the
struggle for racial equality when she refused to give up her bus seat to a
white man in Montgomery, Alabama. Parks' arrest on December 1, 1955
launched the Montgomery Bus Boycott by 17,000 black citizens. A Supreme
Court ruling and declining revenues forced the city to desegregate its buses
thirteen months later. Parks became an instant icon, but her resistance was
a natural extension of a lifelong commitment to activism. Over the years,
she had repeatedly disobeyed bus segregation regulations. Once, she even
had been put off a bus for her defiance.

Rosa Louise McCauley spent the first years of her life on a small farm with
her mother, grandparents and brother. She witnessed night rides by the Kus
Klux Klan and listened in fear as lynchings occurred near her home. The
family moved to Montgomery; Rosa went to school and became a
seamstress. She married barber Raymond Parks in 1932, and the couple
joined the Montgomery National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People (NAACP). When she inspired the bus boycott, Parks had
been the secretary of the local NAACP for twelve years (1943-1956). Parks
founded the Montgomery NAACP Youth Council in the early 1940s. Later, as
secretary of the Alabama State Conference of the NAACP, she traveled
throughout the state interviewing victims of discrimination and witnesses to
lynchings.

In the wake of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Parks lost her tailoring job
and received death threats. She and her family moved to Detroit, Michigan
in 1957. However, she remained an active member of the NAACP and
worked for Congressman John Conyers (1965-1988) helping the homeless
find housing. The Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute Of Self-Development
was established in 1987 to offer job training for black youth. In 1999, Parks
received the Congressional Gold Medal of Honor, the highest honor a
civilian can receive in the United States. The Southern Christian Leadership
Conference (SCLC) also sponsors an annual Rosa Parks Freedom Award.