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Rosa Louise (Mc Cauley) Parks 1913 - 2005

Rosa Louise (Mc Cauley) Parks was born on February 4, 1913 at Alabama 15, in Tuskegee, Macon County, Alabama United States, and died at age 92 years old on October 24, 2005.

Rosa Louise (Mc Cauley) Parks

Rosa Louise Parks (McCauley)

February 4, 1913

Alabama 15, in Tuskegee, Macon County, Alabama, United States

October 24, 2005

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Rosa Louise (Mc Cauley) Parks Rosa Parks (1913 - 2005)

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Rosa Louise (Mc Cauley) Parks' History: 1913 - 2005

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Introduction

NAME Rosa Parks BIRTH DATE February 4, 1913 DEATH DATE October 24, 2005 DID YOU KNOW? Before Rosa Parks, there were a number of others who resisted bus segregation and filed suit. DID YOU KNOW? After her famous act, Parks lost her job and endured death threats for years to come. DID YOU KNOW? Upon Parks' death in 2005, she became the first woman to lie in honor at the Capitol Rotunda. EDUCATION Industrial School for Girls, Alabama State Teachers College for Negroes PLACE OF BIRTH Tuskegee, Alabama PLACE OF DEATH Detroit, Michigan WHO WAS ROSA PARKS? ARREST LIFE AFTER THE BUS BOYCOTT ACCOMPLISHMENTS AND AWARDS CITE THIS PAGE QUOTES 1 of 18 “At the time I was arrested, I had no idea it would turn into this. It was just a day like any other day. The only thing that made it significant was that the masses of the people joined in.” —Rosa Parks Rosa Parks Biography (1913–2005) UPDATED:APR 24, 2020 ORIGINAL:FEB 27, 2018 Rosa Parks was a civil rights activist who refused to surrender her seat to a white passenger on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Her defiance sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Its success launched nationwide efforts to end racial segregation of public facilities. Who Was Rosa Parks? Rosa Parks was a civil rights leader whose refusal to give up her seat to a white passenger on a segregated bus led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Her bravery led to nationwide efforts to end racial segregation. Parks was awarded the Martin Luther King Jr. Award by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal. Early Life and Family Parks was born Rosa Louise McCauley on February 4, 1913, in Tuskegee, Alabama. Her parents, James and Leona McCauley, separated when Parks was two. Parks’ mother moved the family to Pine Level, Alabama, to live with her parents, Rose and Sylvester Edwards. Both of Parks' grandparents were formerly enslaved and strong advocates for racial equality; the family lived on the Edwards' farm, where Parks would spend her youth. Parks' childhood brought her early experiences with racial discrimination and activism for racial equality. In one experience, Parks' grandfather stood in front of their house with a shotgun while Ku Klux Klan members marched down the street.
02/4

1913

Birthday

February 4, 1913

Birthdate

Alabama 15, in Tuskegee, Macon County, Alabama United States

Birthplace

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Ethnicity & Family History

African American.
Early Life & Education

Parks’ mother moved the family to Pine Level, Alabama, to live with her parents, Rose and Sylvester Edwards. Both of Parks' grandparents were formerly enslaved and strong advocates for racial equality; the family lived on the Edwards' farm, where Parks would spend her youth.
Professional Career

Rosa Parks Born Rosa Louise McCauley February 4, 1913 Tuskegee, Alabama, U.S. Died October 24, 2005 (aged 92) Detroit, Michigan, U.S. Resting place Woodlawn Cemetery, Detroit, Michigan, U.S. Occupation Civil rights activist Known for Montgomery bus boycott Movement Civil Rights Movement Spouse(s) Raymond Parks (m. 1932; died 1977) Signature Rosa Parks Signature.svg Rosa Louise McCauley Parks (February 4, 1913 – October 24, 2005) was an American activist in the civil rights movement best known for her pivotal role in the Montgomery bus boycott. The United States Congress has called her "the first lady of civil rights" and "the mother of the freedom movement". On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Parks rejected bus driver James F. Blake's order to relinquish her seat in the "colored section" to a white passenger, after the whites-only section was filled. Parks was not the first person to resist bus segregation, but the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) believed that she was the best candidate for seeing through a court challenge after her arrest for civil disobedience in violating Alabama segregation laws. Parks' prominence in the community and her willingness to become a controversial figure inspired the black community to boycott the Montgomery buses for over a year, the first major direct action campaign of the post-war civil rights movement. Her case became bogged down in the state courts, but the federal Montgomery bus lawsuit Browder v. Gayle succeeded in November 1956. Parks' act of defiance and the Montgomery bus boycott became important symbols of the movement. She became an international icon of resistance to racial segregation. She organized and collaborated with civil rights leaders, including Edgar Nixon, president of the local chapter of the NAACP; and Martin Luther King Jr., a new minister in Montgomery who gained national prominence in the civil rights movement and went on to win a Nobel Peace Prize. Though employed as a seamstress at a local department store at the time, Parks was also secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP. She had recently attended the Highlander Folk School, a Tennessee center for training activists for workers' rights and racial equality. She acted as a private citizen "tired of giving in". Although widely honored in later years, she also suffered for her act; she was fired from her job, and received death threats for years afterwards.[4] Shortly after the boycott, she moved to Detroit, where she briefly found similar work. From 1965 to 1988, she served as secretary and receptionist to John Conyers, an African-American US Representative. She was also active in the Black Power movement and the support of political prisoners in the US. After retirement, Parks wrote her autobiography and continued to insist that the struggle for justice was not over and there was more work to be done.[5] In her final years, she suffered from dementia. Parks received national recognition, including the NAACP's 1979 Spingarn Medal, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Congressional Gold Medal, and a posthumous statue in the United States Capitol's National Statuary Hall. Upon her death in 2005, she was the first woman to lie in honor in the Capitol Rotunda, becoming the thirty-first person to receive this honor. California and Missouri commemorate Rosa Parks Day on her birthday, February 4, while Ohio and Oregon commemorate the occasion on the anniversary of the day she was arrested, December 1.
Personal Life & Family

Early life Rosa Parks was born Rosa Louise McCauley in Tuskegee, Alabama, on February 4, 1913, to Leona (née Edwards), a teacher, and James McCauley, a carpenter. In addition to African ancestry, one of Parks' great-grandfathers was Scots-Irish and one of her great-grandmothers a part-Native American slave. She was small as a child and suffered poor health with chronic tonsillitis. When her parents separated, she moved with her mother to Pine Level, just outside the state capital, Montgomery. She grew up on a farm with her maternal grandparents, mother, and younger brother Sylvester. They all were members of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), a century-old independent black denomination founded by free blacks in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in the early nineteenth century. McCauley attended rural schools until the age of eleven. As a student at the Industrial School for Girls in Montgomery, she took academic and vocational courses. Parks went on to a laboratory school set up by the Alabama State Teachers College for Negroes for secondary education, but dropped out in order to care for her grandmother and later her mother, after they became ill.[11] Around the turn of the 20th century, the former Confederate states had adopted new constitutions and electoral laws that effectively disenfranchised black voters and, in Alabama, many poor white voters as well. Under the white-established Jim Crow laws, passed after Democrats regained control of southern legislatures, racial segregation was imposed in public facilities and retail stores in the South, including public transportation. Bus and train companies enforced seating policies with separate sections for blacks and whites. School bus transportation was unavailable in any form for black schoolchildren in the South, and black education was always underfunded. Parks recalled going to elementary school in Pine Level, where school buses took white students to their new school and black students had to walk to theirs: I'd see the bus pass every day ... But to me, that was a way of life; we had no choice but to accept what was the custom. The bus was among the first ways I realized there was a black world and a white world. Although Parks' autobiography recounts early memories of the kindness of white strangers, she could not ignore the racism of her society. When the Ku Klux Klan marched down the street in front of their house, Parks recalls her grandfather guarding the front door with a shotgun.[13] The Montgomery Industrial School, founded and staffed by white northerners for black children, was burned twice by arsonists. Its faculty was ostracized by the white community. Repeatedly bullied by white children in her neighborhood, Parks often fought back physically. She later said: "As far back as I remember, I could never think in terms of accepting physical abuse without some form of retaliation if possible.":208
10/24

2005

Death

October 24, 2005

Death date

Unknown
Cause of death

Unknown
Death location

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Obituary

ROSA PARKS OBITUARY DETROIT (AP) - Rosa Lee Parks, whose refusal to give up her bus seat to a white man sparked the modern civil rights movement, died Monday. She was 92. Mrs. Parks died at her home of natural causes, said Karen Morgan, a spokeswoman for U.S. Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich. Mrs. Parks was 42 when she committed an act of defiance in 1955 that was to change the course of American history and earn her the title ''mother of the civil rights movement.'' At that time, Jim Crow laws in place since the post-Civil War Reconstruction required separation of the races in buses, restaurants and public accommodations throughout the South, while legally sanctioned racial discrimination kept blacks out of many jobs and neighborhoods in the North. The Montgomery, Ala., seamstress, an active member of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, was riding on a city bus Dec. 1, 1955, when a white man demanded her seat. Mrs. Parks refused, despite rules requiring blacks to yield their seats to whites. Two black Montgomery women had been arrested earlier that year on the same charge, but Mrs. Parks was jailed. She also was fined $14. Speaking in 1992, she said history too often maintains ''that my feet were hurting and I didn't know why I refused to stand up when they told me. But the real reason of my not standing up was I felt that I had a right to be treated as any other passenger. We had endured that kind of treatment for too long.'' Her arrest triggered a 381-day boycott of the bus system organized by a then little -known Baptist minister, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who later earned the Nobel Peace Prize for his work. ''At the time I was arrested I had no idea it would turn into this,'' Mrs. Parks said 30 years later. ''It was just a day like any other day. The only thing that made it significant was that the masses of the people joined in.'' The Montgomery bus boycott, which came one year after the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark declaration that separate schools for blacks and whites were ''inherently unequal,'' marked the start of the modern civil rights movement. The movement culminated in the 1964 federal Civil Rights Act, which banned racial discrimination in public accommodations. After taking her public stand for civil rights, Mrs. Parks had trouble finding work in Alabama. Amid threats and harassment, she and her husband Raymond moved to Detroit in 1957. She worked as an aide in Conyers' Detroit office from 1965 until retiring Sept. 30, 1988. Raymon d Parks died in 1977. Mrs. Parks became a revered figure in Detroit, where a street and middle school were named for her and a papier-mache likeness of her was featured in the city's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Mrs. Parks said upon retiring from her job with Conyers that she wanted to devote more time to the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development. The institute, incorporated in 1987, is devoted to developing leadership among Detroit's young people and initiating them into the struggle for civil rights.

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Did you know?

Rosa Louise (Mc Cauley) Parks lived 26 years longer than the average family member when died at the age of 92.

The average age of a Mc Cauley family member is 66.

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