Rosa Parks

Rosa Louise McCauley was born on the fourth of February 1913 at Tuskegee, Alabama, the elder of two children of James McCauley — a carpenter — and Leona Edwards, a schoolteacher. Her father left the household when she was two and she was raised by her mother and her maternal grandparents Sylvester and Rose Edwards — formerly enslaved Methodists and members of the African Methodist Episcopal Church — at their small farm at Pine Level. She attended the segregated rural schools of Pine Level and then the Industrial School for Girls at Montgomery before withdrawing in the eleventh grade to care for her grandmother. She married Raymond Parks, a Montgomery barber and NAACP activist, in 1932 and completed her high-school diploma the following year.

She joined the Montgomery branch of the NAACP in December 1943 — one of very few women in the chapter — and was elected branch secretary at the meeting at which she joined. She served as secretary for the following thirteen years. Across those years she conducted the principal field investigation work of the Montgomery NAACP into voter-registration discrimination, into the lynchings of Black men in Alabama and Mississippi, and most particularly into a sequence of cases of the rape of Black women by white men. The 1944 case of Recy Taylor of Abbeville, Alabama — which Rosa Parks investigated personally and on which she co-founded the Committee for Equal Justice for Recy Taylor — is the documented precedent of her 1955 act of refusal.

On the first of December 1955 she boarded the Cleveland Avenue bus in downtown Montgomery and took a seat in the row immediately behind the white section. When the white section filled and the driver moved the partition rearward, she refused to surrender her seat. She was arrested for violation of the Montgomery municipal segregation ordinance. The next day E. D. Nixon, president of the Montgomery NAACP, and the Women's Political Council under Jo Ann Robinson called for a one-day boycott of the buses on the fifth of December; the meeting that same evening at the Holt Street Baptist Church voted to extend the boycott. It lasted three hundred eighty-one days.

She and her husband Raymond moved north to Detroit in 1957 under threat. She worked from 1965 to 1988 in the Detroit office of Congressman John Conyers. She died at Detroit on the twenty-fourth of October 2005, at ninety-two.

She is honored here as the secretary of the Montgomery NAACP whose refusal began the bus boycott.