Genealogy and History Fan

Rosa Louise McCauley was born on February 4, 1913 in Tuskegee, Alabama. Her father James McCauley, was a carpenter and her mother Leona Edwards, was a teacher. Rosa, as a child, was small for her age and suffered poor health. She was raised on her maternal grandparents farm near Montgomery, Alabama. She lived there with her grandparents, her mother and her younger brother Sylvester. Rosa was home schooled by her mother until she was 11 years old. She enrolled in school to take academic and vocational classes but had to drop out to help care for her grandmother and mother who became ill.

In 1932, Rosa married Raymond Parks who was a barber from Montgomery. After her marriage Rosa was employed as a domestic worker and also as a hospital aide. With her husband’s encouragement, Rosa finished high school in 1933. This was at a time when less than 7% of African American had a high school diploma.

Rosa and her husband Raymond were members of the NAACP. She served for many years as the secretary of the Montgomery chapter.

In 1955, Rosa worked at Montgomery Fair, a department store in downtown Montgomery. She boarded her usual bus at 6pm, Thursday December 1, to go home. She paid the fare and sat in the first row of seats in the “colored section”. When the bus became crowded, the bus driver ordered Rosa to relinquish her seat to a white man as was the cultural order of things at that time. But Rosa Parks was not interested in seeing that the cultural order of things continue. She refused to give up that seat.

The explosion of outrage and social change that was released by that one simple act of “civil disobedience” is the watershed moment that anyone affected by the civil rights movement points to as the most important event in modern black history. Rosa Parks was arrested for not giving her seat up that day. Her trial for that act of “civil disobedience” brought to the national spotlight another important leader in the civil rights movement by the name of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

This one event began to escalate and gather energy in the black community. It was an exciting and somewhat frightening time as the black community was energized and began to organize around these two courageous leaders. The result was the most powerful civil rights protests in the history of the movement occurred. This protest came to be known as the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

Rosa Parks was not a trained instigator or a skilled manipulator of groups. She was just a citizen and an “ordinary” woman with simple daily needs. She was not looking to start a nation changing civil rights movement when she refused to give up her bus seat.

Rosa Parks won the right to be treated as a human being for herself and for her people across America and even around the world. She is an inspiration to us all that we too must demand the right of simple human dignity for all people who are citizens of this great land. 

In 1996, President Bill Clinton presented Rosa with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 1999 she was awarded a Congressional Gold Medal.

Rosa Parks died October 24, 2005. President George Bush ordered that all U.S. flags in public areas be flown at half-staff on the day of her funeral. She was the 31^st person and the 1^st woman whose body lay in state at the U.S. Capitol Rotunda.

The infamous bus is at the Henry Ford Museum in Detroit, Michigan. On the 50^th anniversary of her arrest, President Bush declared that a statue of Parks be included in the United States Capitol’s National Statuary Hall. You’re come a long way Rosa!