Rosa Parks

Rosa Louise McCauley Parks was an American activist in the civil rights movement best known for her pivotal role in the Montgomery bus boycott. She was born on 4 February 1913. Let’s learn about her on her birthday.

On 1 December 1995, in Montgomery, Alabama Rosa Parks was asked by a bus driver to vacate a seat reserved for a ‘colored’ person in favor of a white person, when three other seats near her were also free. She refused to move from her place. She was arrested for this based on civil disobedience. After her arrest, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) believed that Rosa was the best candidate for seeing through a court challenge.

Rosa helped inspire the black community to boycott the Montgomery buses for over a year. In 1956 the bus segregation laws were declared unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. However, Rosa Parks was fired from her job and she continued to receive death threats even years later. She managed to find another job in Detroit.

After her retirement, Rosa Parks wrote her autobiography and insisted that there was much more work to be done in the struggle for work. Rosa Parks received National recognition for her work. She received various accolades. Upon her death in 2005, she was the first woman to lie in honor in the Capitol Rotunda. California and Missouri commemorate Rosa Parks Day on her birthday, February 4, while Ohio, Oregon, and Texas commemorate the anniversary of her arrest, on December 1.

–Poorna Krishnan