PARKS, ROSA

born Feb. 4, 1913, Tuskegee, Ala., U.S. Rosa Parks sitting on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, 1956. in full Rosa Louise McCauley Parks black American civil rights activist whose refusal to relinquish her seat on a public bus to a white man precipitated the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott in Alabama, which is recognized as the spark that ignited the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. Parks attended Alabama State College (now Alabama State University) and made her living as a seamstress. In 1943 she became a member of the Montgomery chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and she served as its secretary until 1956. On December 1, 1955, she was arrested for refusing to relinquish her seat on a public bus to a white man, a violation of the city's racial segregation ordinances. Under the aegis of the Montgomery Improvement Association and the leadership of the young pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Martin Luther King, Jr., a boycott of the municipal bus company was begun on December 5. (African Americans constituted 70 percent of the ridership.) The boycott lasted until December 20, 1956, when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a lower court's decision declaring Montgomery's segregated seating unconstitutional. For her role in igniting the successful campaign, which brought King to national prominence, Parks became known as the "mother of the Civil Rights Movement." In 1957 Parks moved with her husband and mother to Detroit, where from 1965 to 1988 she was a member of the staff of Michigan Congressman John Conyers, Jr. She remained active in the NAACP, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference established the annual Rosa Parks Freedom Award in her honour. In 1987 she founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development to provide career training for young people. Her autobiography, Rosa Parks: My Story (1992), was written with Jim Haskins. In 1999 she was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal of Honor, the highest honour a civilian can receive in the United States.