Rosa Parks was born Rosa Louise McCauley in Tuskegee, Alabama
to James McCauley, a carpenter, and Leona McCauley, a teacher. At the age of two
she moved to her grandparents' farm in Pine Level, Alabama with her mother and
younger brother, Sylvester. At the age of 11 she enrolled in the Montgomery
Industrial School for Girls, a private school founded by liberal-minded women
from the northern United States. The school's philosophy of self-worth was
consistent with Leona McCauley's advice to "take advantage of the opportunities,
no matter how few they were."Opportunities were
few indeed. "Back then," Mrs. Parks recalled in an interview, "we didn't have
any civil rights. It was just a matter of survival, of existing from one day to
the next. I remember going to sleep as a girl hearing the Klan ride at night and
hearing a lynching and being afraid the house would burn down." In the same
interview, she cited her lifelong acquaintance with fear as the reason for her
relative fearlessness in deciding to appeal her conviction during the bus
boycott. "I didn't have any special fear," she said. "It was more of a relief to
know that I wasn't alone.After attending Alabama State Teachers College, the young
Rosa settled in Montgomery, with her husband, Raymond Parks. The couple joined
the local chapter of the NAACP and worked quietly for many years to improve the
lot of African-Americans in the segregated south.
"I worked on numerous cases with the NAACP," Mrs. Parks
recalled, "but we did not get the publicity. There were cases of flogging,
peonage, murder, and rape. We didn't seem to have too many successes. It was
more a matter of trying to challenge the powers that be, and to let it be known
that we did not wish to continue being second-class citizens."The bus incident
led to the formation of the Montgomery Improvement Association, led by the young
pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The
association called for a boycott of the city-owned bus company. The boycott
lasted 382 days and brought Mrs. Parks, Dr. King, and their cause to the
attention of the world. A Supreme Court Decision struck down the Montgomery
ordinance under which Mrs. Parks had been fined, and outlawed racial segregation
on public transportation.
In 1957, Mrs. Parks and her husband moved to Detroit,
Michigan where Mrs. Parks served on the staff of U.S. Representative John
Conyers. The Southern Christian Leadership Council established an annual Rosa
Parks Freedom Award in her honor.
After the death of her husband in 1977, Mrs. Parks founded
the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development. The Institute
sponsors an annual summer program for teenagers called Pathways to Freedom. The
young people tour the country in buses, under adult supervision, learning the
history of their country and of the civil rights movement. President Clinton
presented Rosa Parks with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1996. She
received a Congressional Gold Medal in 1999.When asked if she
was happy living in retirement, Rosa Parks replied, "I do the very best I can to
look upon life with optimism and hope and looking forward to a better day, but I
don't think there is any such thing as complete happiness. It pains me that
there is still a lot of Klan activity and racism. I think when you say you're
happy, you have everything that you need and everything that you want, and
nothing more to wish for. I haven't reached that stage yet."
Mrs. Parks spent her last years living quietly in Detroit,
where she died in 2005 at the age of 92. After her death, her casket was placed
in the rotunda of the United States Capitol for two days, so the nation could
pay its respects to the woman whose courage had changed the lives of so many.
She is the only woman and second African American in American history to lie in
state at the Capitol, an honor usually reserved for Presidents of the United
States.