The great renown that Rosa Parks has earned as the “mother of the civil rights movement” often overwhelms this modest woman. She changed the course of American life; yet her simple refusal to capitulate to racism was unplanned. She explains that she was “just one of many who fought for freedom.”
On December 1, 1955, Parks took a city bus home from her job at a store in downtown Montgomery, Alabama. According to the segregation laws of the day, Parks, an African American, was required to sit in the back of the bus. She was accused of encroaching on the whites-only section, and the bus driver tried to convince her to obey the law. Instead, Parks kept both her dignified mien and her seat. At last, the driver warned her that he would send for the police. “Go ahead and call them,” Parks answered.
Rosa Parks was arrested, jailed, tried, convicted, and fined. She refused to pay. Her experience set off a 382-day boycott of Montgomery city buses. When her case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, the justices declared the segregation of
Montgomery’s public transportation to be unconstitutional.
Rosa Parks’s courage inspired all those struggling for their civil rights, but her life was seriously disrupted. She was constantly harassed and received threats, some of them dire. In 1957, she and her husband moved to Detroit to escape persistent ill will. There she founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development, a school for teens, and continued her work for racial equality. In 1999, Rosa Parks was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest honor given by the American government.