Representative John Conyers, one of the leading African American members of Congress, and managed his Detroit office until her retirement in 1988. The following year, she returned to Alabama to help lead the final leg of the Selma-to-Montgomery march in pursuit of voting rights in the South. Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, banning segregation in public accommodations. She was invited to attend the July 2 ceremony at which Pres. Parks resumed work as a seamstress but remained an active spokesperson for the civil rights community. Seeking a reprieve from the death threats and other pressures brought about by Rosa’s fame, the Parkses moved to Detroit in 1957 to be near her brother. The successful boycott served as an inspiration to black communities throughout the nation and established Rosa Parks as the “mother of the civil rights movement.” Gayle, Parks took a symbolic first ride near the front of a city bus. Supreme Court affirmed a district court’s ruling against segregation in Browder v. Nixon, former president of the Montgomery NAACP, bailed her out, and attorney and activist Fred Gray represented her in the subsequent trial, which resulted in a $10 fine.Īlthough it was not her intention, Parks’s decision to violate the segregation ordinance triggered a year-long boycott of Montgomery’s buses by the city’s black population and prompted a challenge of the ordinance’s constitutionality in federal court. (All black passengers were required by law to leave the row, even if only one white passenger needed a seat.) Parks decided the time had come to take her stand she refused to get up, and at the driver’s request two Montgomery police officers escorted her off the bus and to city hall to be arrested. When a white man got on and was unable to find a seat in the whites-only section, the bus driver demanded that Parks and three other black passengers give up their seats. She boarded a crowded bus after work and took a seat. On December 1, 1955, Parks’ convictions were put to the test. Upon her return, Parks redoubled her commitment to the civil rights community and its effort to overthrow the Jim Crow laws that regulated virtually every aspect of African Americans’ lives. The school had been founded in 1932 as a training facility for social activists, and there Parks learned effective strategies to protest segregation, including picketing methods and guidelines for establishing citizenship training schools to help people pass voting tests. Through her work as a seamstress, Parks came into contact with white civil rights activists Clifford and Virginia Durr, and in the summer of 1955 they sponsored a week-long stay for her at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee. In the early 1940s, Parks became active in the Montgomery chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ( NAACP), serving as its secretary and teaching young people about their rights and responsibilities as U.S. At age 19, she married Raymond Parks, a barber from Wedowee, Randolph County. Family illnesses forced McCauley to quit school at age 16, when she began cleaning houses for white people and taking in sewing. In 1924, 11-year-old McCauley enrolled in the Montgomery Industrial School for Girls, which offered a vocational curriculum of cooking, sewing, and housekeeping under the instruction of northern whites. There, she began her education in an all-black school with a single teacher serving all 50 students. She spent much of her childhood living with her maternal grandparents in Pine Level, a small town in southeast Montgomery County. Rosa Louise McCauley was born in Tuskegee on February 4, 1913, to James McCauley, a carpenter and stonemason, and Leona Edwards, a teacher. Parks continued to work for civil rights causes during her entire life and was awarded the nation’s highest honors for her role in the movement. to the forefront as the movement’s leader. Her 1955 arrest in Montgomery for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott and set in motion a chain of events that resulted in ground-breaking civil rights legislation and helped to bring Martin Luther King Jr. Rosa Parks (1913-2005) is one of the most enduring symbols of the tumultuous civil rights era of the mid-twentieth century.
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