Rosa Parks

Rosa Parks was born on February 4, 1913. Interestingly, she was also arrested on her birthday. Rosa Parks attended the Industrial School for Girls high school in Montgomery, Alabama. What interested me most about Rosa Parks was that she was an African-American woman who made a difference in the world and made her voice be heard by others.

On December 1, 1955, civil activist Rosa Parks, a 42 year old African American woman who worked as a seamstress, boarded the Montgomery city bus to go home from work. She refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on the Montgomery bus. Parks was not the first person to resist bus segregation. Others had taken similar steps in the twentieth century, including Irene Morgan.

NAACP organizers believed that Parks was the best candidate for seeing through a court challenge after her arrest for civil disobedience in violating Alabama segregation laws though eventually her case became bogged down in the state courts. She had recently attended the Highlander Folk School, a Tennessee center for training activists for workers' rights and racial equality. She became an international icon of resistance to racial segregation. She organized and collaborated with civil rights leaders, including Edgar Nixon, president of the local chapter of the NAACP; and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, a new minister in town who gained national prominence in the civil rights movement. The results of that was that the state of Alabama bus spurred a city-wide boycott to end segregation. So the city didn’t have any choice but to lift the law requiring segregation on public buses. Rosa Parks initiated a new era in the American quest for equality and freedom.