Rosa Parks was an African-American Civil Rights activist. She became the catalyst for the Civil Rights movement when she refused to move from her seat on the segregated buses in Montgomery, Alabama.
Parks was brought up in a family that bore the scars of slavery, her grandparents were former slaves and advocates for racial equality. On one occasion her grandfather stood outside of his house with a shotgun while members of the Ku Klux Klan marched down the street.
Under the Jim Crow laws racial segregation was in place in public facilities, retail stores and public transportation in the South. Buses and trains enforced separate sections for black and white passengers. Black children had to walk to school while white children rode school buses and black education was underfunded leading to a disgraceful lack of provision of both education and supplies.
Parks was forced to leave school early to care for her sick grandmother, it wasn’t until after she married Raymond Parks that she was unable to gain her high school diploma at age 20. Raymond Parks was a member of the NAACP and Parks joined in 1943. She was a the Montgomery chapter’s youth leader as well as secretary to NAACP President E.D. Nixon.
On December 1, 1955 Parks was riding the segregated buses when she was asked to move so that a white passenger could take her seat. She was sitting in the black section of the bus when the driver, James F. Blake (who she had trouble with previously) moved the sign designating the sections. She refused to move, tired of giving in to the unfair segregation laws and was arrested. This happened around nine months after Claudette Colvin had refused to give up her seat. Parks challenged her arrest which in turn challenged the legality of segregation. Parks action was the catalyst that caused the Montgomery Bus Boycott, lead by Martin Luther King, Jr. The boycott lasted 381 days, into December 1956 when it was ruled that segregation was unconstitutional and the buses in Alabama were desegregation of buses.
The Montgomery Bus Boycott was the beginning of a revolutionary era of non-violent mass protests in support of civil rights in the United States. Rosa Parks became an icon of the Civil Rights Movement.