Rosa Parks

Rosa Louise McCauley Parks (1913 – 2005) was an iconic activist during the mid twentieth century civil rights movement. Born in Tuskegee, she later moved with her mother to Pine Level near Montgomery, Alabama. Encouraged by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to challenge Alabama’s segregation laws through passive civil disobedience, she refused Montgomery bus driver James F. Blake’s demand on December 1, 1955, to give up her seat to a white passenger after the whites-only section had filled. Her resistance sparked a community-wide bus boycott that lasted for over a year. Asked about her refusal, she said that she “was tired of giving in.” Her actions and those of others led to the United States District Court for the Middle District of Alabama ruling in Browder v. Gayle that bus segregation was unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections for equal treatment, a decision the U.S. Supreme Court upheld on November 13, 1956. Her actions later brought her the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994 and the Medal of Freedom in September 1996.

Tuskegee, Alabama · United States