In Memory of Rosa Parks

BLACK HISTORY MONTH 2006

OAK RIDGE NATIONAL LABORATORY

1913—2005

Rosa Parks was born Rosa Louise McCauley in Tuskegee, Alabama, the daughter of James and Leona McCauley, a carpenter and a teacher. When her parents separated, she moved with her mother and younger brother to Pine Level, Alabama, just outside of Montgomery. Her mother Leona home schooled Rosa until she was eleven, when she enrolled in the Industrial School for Girls in Montgomery, where her aunt lived, and took some academic and some vocational courses. Parks then went on to a laboratory school set up by the Alabama State Teachers College for Negroes for secondary education, but was forced to drop out to care for her grandmother and later her mother after she grew ill.

In 1932, Rosa married Raymond Parks, a barber from Montgomery. Raymond was a member of the NAACP. After her marriage, Rosa took a number of jobs ranging from domestic worker to hospital aide. At her husband's urging she finished her high school studies in 1933. Despite the Jim Crow laws that made political participation by black people difficult, Rosa succeeded in registering to vote on her third try. She became active in the Civil Rights Movement and joined the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP in 1943.

Parks is famous for her refusal on December 1, 1955 to obey a bus driver's demand that she give up her seat to a white passenger. Her subsequent arrest and trial for this act of civil disobedience ignited the Montgomery Bus Boycott, one of the largest and most successful mass movements against racial segregation in history, and launched Martin Luther King, Jr., one of the organizers of the boycott, to the forefront of the civil rights movement. The boycott lasted and brought Mrs. Parks, Dr. King, and their cause to the attention of the world. A Supreme Court Decision struck down the Montgomery ordinance under which Mrs. Parks had be fined and outlawed racial segregation on public transportation.

In 1957, Mrs. Parks and her husband moved to Detroit, Michigan. Parks worked as a seamstress until 1965, when African-American U.S. Representative John Conyers hired her as a secretary and receptionist for his congressional office in Detroit. She held this position until she retired in 1988.

Her role in American history earned her an iconic status in American culture, and her actions have left an enduring legacy for civil rights movements worldwide.

Mrs. Parks spent her last years living quietly in Detroit, where she died in 2005 at the age of 92. After her death, her casket was placed in the rotunda of the United States Capitol. She was the first woman in American History to lie in state at the Capitol, an honor usually reserved for Presidents of the United States.

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