Rosa Louise Parks

Rosa Louise (McCauley) Parks is the name of my hero. I chose her because, as many say, she is “The Mother of the Civil Rights Movement”. In other words, she started the actions that led to equal rights for blacks in America.

Parks sitting on the bus (Google)

On February 4, 1913, Parks was born in Tuskegee, Alabama. Her mother and her grandparents in Tuskegee and Montgomery raised her. She married a barber by the name of Raymond Parks in 1932, at the age of 18. They both worked for the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (also known as NAACP).

Parks being arrested (Google)

Parks was riding home on a bus on December 1st, 1955, when the bus driver ordered her to give up her seat to a white man. She refused. She was then arrested and fined $14. Her arrest triggered the Montgomery bus boycott. A boycott means that people stop doing something in order to make it change. In this case, most of the blacks decided to stop riding on the buses so that the buses would run out of business. They did this because they were tired of being treated wrongly. The boycott started December 5th, 1995 and ended on December 20th, 1956, because the U.S. Supreme Court changed the law, so blacks no longer HAD to sit in the back of the bus.

Parks honoured (Google)

In 1957 both Parks moved to Detroit, Michigan because they could no longer find work because of the thing that Rosa had done, and because of the harassment they had received. Parks got a job with a congressman named John Conyers Jr. in 1965. Parks received the Martin Luther King Jr. Nonviolent Peace prize in 1980. The Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute of Self Development in Detroit were founded in 1987. Rosa Louise (McCauley) Parks still lives today in 2004 located in Detroit, Michigan.