Rosa Louise McCauley Parks was an American activist in the civil rights movement. She is best known for her pivotal role in the Montgomery bus boycott. Parks received national recognition, including the NAACP’s 1979 Spingarn Medal. She was the first woman to lie in honor in the Capitol Rotunda.
About Rosa Parks in brief
Rosa Louise McCauley Parks was an American activist in the civil rights movement. She is best known for her pivotal role in the Montgomery bus boycott. She was the first woman to lie in honor in the Capitol Rotunda, becoming the thirty-first person to receive this honor. Parks received national recognition, including the NAACP’s 1979 Spingarn Medal, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Congressional Gold Medal, and a posthumous statue in the United States Capitol’s National Statuary Hall. The U.S. Congress has called her \”the first lady of civil rights\” and \”the mother of the freedom movement\”. She was born in Tuskegee, Alabama, on February 4, 1913, to Leona, a teacher, and James McCauly, a carpenter. In addition to African ancestry, one of Parks’ great-grandfathers was Scots-Irish and one of her great- grandmothers a part-Native American slave. She started piecing quilts from around the age of six, as her mother and grandmother were making quilts, she put her first quilt together by herself around theage of ten. She grew up on a farm with her maternal grandparents, mother, and younger brother Sylvester. She learned more sewing in school from age of eleven; she sewed her own first dress could wear on her first day of high school. She went on to set up a student union in Montgomery, Alabama for black students, but dropped out in order to care for her grandmother and later her mother, after they became ill. She also worked as a secretary and receptionist to John Conyers, an African-American US Representative.
After retirement, Parks wrote her autobiography and continued to insist that the struggle for justice was not over and there was more work to be done. California and Missouri commemorate Rosa Parks Day on her birthday, February 4. Ohio and Oregon commemorate the occasion on the anniversary of the day she was arrested, December 1. She died in 2005, aged 89. She had a son, Michael, who is now the president of the University of Alabama at Montgomery and a grandson, Michael Parks, who works for the National Park Service. She has a daughter, Rosa Louise, who was born on February 5, 1913. She attended rural schools until age of 11, and later went to college at Alabama State Teachers College for secondary education. In the early 20th century, the former Confederate states had adopted new constitutions that effectively disenfranchised black and white voters, in Alabama, as well as many white voters as well. Bus and train companies enforced separate seating sections for blacks and whites in public transportation. In 1956, the federal Montgomery bus lawsuit Browder v. Gayle resulted in a November 1956 decision that bus segregation is unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution. The case became bogged down in the state courts, but the federal court ruled in favor of the bus company.
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This page is based on the article Rosa Parks published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 10, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
