Why Rosa Parks famous
Introduction
ROSA PARKS (1913 - 2005)Called "the mother of the civil rights movement," Rosa Parks invigorated the struggle for racial equality when she refused to give up her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama. Parks' arrest on December 1, 1955 launched the Montgomery Bus Boycott by 17,000 black citizens. A Supreme Court ruling and declining revenues forced the city to desegregate its buses thirteen months later. Parks became an instant icon, but her resistance was a natural extension of a lifelong commitment to activism. Over the years, she had repeatedly disobeyed bus segregation regulations. Once, she even had been put off a bus for her defiance.
Rosa Louise McCauley spent the first years of her life on a small farm with her mother, grandparents and brother. She witnessed night rides by the Kus Klux Klan and listened in fear as lynchings occurred near her home. The family moved to Montgomery; Rosa went to school and became a seamstress. She married barber Raymond Parks in 1932, and the couple joined the Montgomery National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). When she inspired the bus boycott, Parks had been the secretary of the local NAACP for twelve years (1943-1956). Parks founded the Montgomery NAACP Youth Council in the early 1940s. Later, as secretary of the Alabama State Conference of the NAACP, she traveled throughout the state interviewing victims of discrimination and witnesses to lynchings.
In the wake of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Parks lost her tailoring job and received death threats. She and her family moved to Detroit, Michigan in 1957. However, she remained an active member of the NAACP and worked for Congressman John Conyers (1965-1988) helping the homeless find housing. The Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute Of Self-Development was established in 1987 to offer job training for black youth. In 1999, Parks received the Congressional Gold Medal of Honor, the highest honor a civilian can receive in the United States. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) also sponsors an annual Rosa Parks Freedom Award.
Facts About Rosa Parks
1. Parks wasn't the first
Fifteen-year-old civil rights activist Claudette Colvin came before Parks in making news for being dragged off a bus and jailed for not giving up her seat. But she became pregnant soon after her arrest and civil rights leaders opted against using her as the case to spark a movement. That's where Rosa Parks came in.
2. She was an activist
Parks was a seamstress by trade, but was deeply active in the NAACP, working to improve civil rights in her community. Her Dec. 1 action of refusing to give her seat in the black section of the bus to a white man was calculated, but not planned for that time. "I got on the bus to go home," Parks has said.
3. Parks knew the bus driver
The driver was James Blake, who had a reputation for treating black passengers without dignity. More than a decade earlier, Blake stopped Parks from entering the front of the bus, telling her to use the back entrance, then sped away before she got on.
4. Parks' arrest was supposed to spark a one-day boycott
Activist E.D. Nixon, who was president of Montgomery's NAACP chapter, led the effort to turn Parks' arrest into a one-day boycott. It was such a success that it transformed into a broader boycott until buses were desegregated, or black people were treated better.
5. It lasted more than a year – and helped galvanize the Civil Rights Movement
After Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. made a speech at Holt Street Baptist Church asking people to join in the fight against segregation, thousands of passengers boycotted Montgomery’s buses regularly for the 381 days it lasted. The boycott dealt a serious financial blow to transportation services – more than 70% of the city's bus patrons were black. Montgomery bus lines lost between 30,000 and 40,000 bus fares each day during the successful boycott.
Conclusion
What Rosa Parks did changed people and a country in a matter of seconds with a 2 letter word. If she never did what she did the United States may still have been the same as it was before the 1950s. Parks made a huge impact on the start of the Civil Rights movement. It started with the Montgomery Bus Boycott which helped the Civil Rights Movement progress. The Civil Rights Movement is what allowed African Americans to have more rights. She really did expand the rights for African Americans in the United States. By expanding the rights she helped them to have many more opportunities and eventually made people realize that skin color shouldn't be an issue in daily life.
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