Rosa Parks

Rosa Louise McCauley was born on February 4, 1913, in Tuskegee, Alabama. Raised in an era of violent racial segregation under Jim Crow laws, she was educated at the Montgomery Industrial School for Girls and Alabama State Teachers College. Marrying Raymond Parks, an active member of the NAACP, she became secretary of the Montgomery branch of the NAACP in 1943, fearlessly investigating sexual assaults and racial violence against Black women across the South.

On Thursday, December 1, 1955, after a long day of work as a department store seamstress, Rosa Parks boarded a Montgomery City bus. When driver James F. Blake demanded that she give up her seat in the 'colored section' for a white passenger, Parks quietly and firmly replied, 'No.' Her subsequent arrest catalyzed the Montgomery Bus Boycott, organized by the Montgomery Improvement Association under a 26-year-old preacher named Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. For 381 straight days, 40,000 Black citizens refused to ride city buses until the U.S. Supreme Court struck down bus segregation as unconstitutional.

Relocating to Detroit in 1957 due to economic boycotts and death threats, Parks served on the congressional staff of Representative John Conyers for over two decades and founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development. For her monumental contributions to human liberty, the United States Congress honored her as 'the first lady of civil rights' and 'the mother of the freedom movement'. Awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1996) and Congressional Gold Medal (1999), Rosa Parks passed away on October 24, 2005, becoming the first woman in American history to lie in honor in the United States Capitol Rotunda.