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Rosa Parks with the Redfern family and others, during California visit, 1998

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Rosa Parks with the Redfern family and others, during California visit, 1998

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Forms part of: Visual Materials from the Rosa Parks Papers (Library of Congress).

Rosa Parks was born Rosa Louise McCauley in Tuskegee, Alabama, on February 4, 1913, to Leona (née Edwards), a teacher, and James McCauley, 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. On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Parks rejected bus driver James F. Blake's order to relinquish her seat in the "colored section" to a white passenger, after the whites-only section was filled. Parks' act of defiance and the Montgomery bus boycott became important symbols of the movement. 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 Martin Luther King Jr., a new minister in Montgomery who gained national prominence in the civil rights movement and went on to win a Nobel Peace Prize. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) believed that she was the best candidate for seeing through a court challenge after her arrest for civil disobedience in violating Alabama segregation laws. Parks' prominence in the community inspired the black community to boycott the Montgomery buses for over a year. Shortly after the boycott, she moved to Detroit, where she was active in the Black Power movement and the support of political prisoners in the US. 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. Upon her death in 2005, she was the first woman to lie in honor in the Capitol Rotunda, becoming the third of only four Americans to ever receive this honor. California and Missouri commemorate Rosa Parks Day on her birthday February 4, while Ohio and Oregon commemorate the occasion on the anniversary of the day she was arrested, December 1.

Rosa Parks (1913–2005) helped initiate the civil rights movement in the United States when she refused to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery, Alabama bus in 1955. Parks was arrested in violation of the city's segregation laws. Her act of defiance sparked a boycott of the city's buses by the African American community, best known as the Montgomery bus boycott. The Montgomery Bus Boycott was led by a young Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., lasted for over a year, and ended with the Supreme Court ruling that segregation on public buses was unconstitutional. Parks' refusal to give up her seat on the bus is seen as a key moment in the civil rights movement. Over the next half-century, Parks became a nationally recognized symbol of dignity and strength in the struggle to end entrenched racial segregation. She is often referred to as the "mother of the civil rights movement." She died in 2005 at the age of 92.

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Date

01/01/1998
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Source

Library of Congress
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Publication may be restricted. For general information see "Visual Materials from the Rosa Parks Papers...," http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/res/689_park.html

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