Rosa Parks
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By Tom Kirvan
A product of the Jim Crow era, Rosa Parks became one of the defining figures in the civil rights movement when she refused to give up her seat to a white man on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Ala. The 1955 act of defiance would eventually earn her the designation as the “first lady of civil rights.”
Born on February 4, 1913 in Tuskegee, Ala., Rosa Louise McCauley eventually moved to Montgomery where she married Raymond Parks, a barber who was deeply involved in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In 1943, Rosa Parks was elected secretary of the NAACP’s Montgomery chapter, setting in motion her lifelong work to right the wrongs associated with segregation.
Her decision to challenge segregation laws in the South sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott championed by a young Baptist preacher, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. A gifted orator, Dr. King rallied the African American community of Montgomery to boycott the Montgomery transit system, a movement that lasted more than a year before a court ruling on December 20, 1956 ordered its desegregation.
In her autobiography, Parks wrote that her refusal to surrender her seat was not simply because she was tired after a long day at work.
“I was not tired physically,” she said, “or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”
Parks moved to Detroit shortly after the boycott ended, returning to her native state for the Selma-to-Montgomery marches that were also pivotal events during the civil rights movement. She eventually worked for Congressman John Conyers, a Democrat from Detroit, serving as his community liaison for housing and economic justice issues. When she died in 2005, Parks became the first female American who was not an elected official to lie in honor in the U.S. Capitol rotunda.
A recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which was bestowed upon her by President William Clinton in 1996, Parks often spoke of her courageous act of civil disobedience, declaring, “You must never be fearful about what you are doing when it is right.”
Other notable quotes from Parks: