Rosa Parks: My Story
(Rosa Parks)

Rosa Louise McCauley Parks was born February 4, 1913 in Tuskegee, Alabama. Her parents were a carpenter and a teacher who encouraged Parks to get a decent education. She was unusually small as a child and was often ill, but she did not let that stand in the way of her academic pursuits. Parks attended rural schools until she was eleven then she transferred to the Industrial School for Girls in Montgomery.

While Parks was attending a laboratory school for Negroes, she was forced to drop out, in order to care for her ailing grandmother, whom she was then living with along with her mother and brother. Parks lived during the time of the Jim Crow laws in the South, when black and white Americans were segregated based on skin color. She was married in 1932 to a man named Raymond Parks who urged her to finish her high school studies and become one of the few African-Americans who achieved a high school diploma; in 1933, she did just that.

Upon graduating from high school Parks joined the Civil Rights Movement to lobby for equal rights for African-American citizens. Over the years, Parks became more involved in the movement and even worked for a white couple who supported and encouraged her in her quest for Civil Rights. It was on December 1, 1955 when Rosa Parks made a move which forever etched her place in history; she refused to give up her seat on the bus for a white man to sit down. Parks’ refusal to move on that fateful day sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott and made her an icon in the Civil Rights Movement. Parks suffered many hardships throughout the rest of her life though she never gave up the fight for equality. In 1992, she published her memoir, My Story, chronicling her life and her place in the Civil Rights Movement. She died October 24, 2005 at age 92.