Rosa Parks rode at the front of a Montgomery, Alabama, bus on the day the Supreme Court's ban on segregation of the city's buses took effect. A year earlier, she had been arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a bus. Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat and set in motion one of the largest social movements in history, the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Find out more about her at womenshistory.org. When Rosa passed away on October 24, 2005, at the age of 92, people around the world mourned her loss. Her body lay in honor in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda, an honor reserved for only a few great Americans. Why Rosa Parks Matters. Rosa Parks’ story is a reminder that courage doesn’t always come with loud speeches or grand gestures. Students will analyze Rosa Parks' evolving activism during the Black Freedom Movement using primary source sets created from the Library of Congress exhibit "Rosa Parks: In Her Own Words.” Students will use the evolving hypothesis strategy to answer the focus question. Rosa Parks (1913—2005) helped initiate the civil rights movement in the United States when she refused to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery, Alabama bus in 1955. Her actions [1] On a cold December evening in 1955, Rosa Parks quietly incited a revolution — by just sitting down. She was tired after spending the day at work as a department store seamstress. She stepped onto the bus for the ride home and sat in the fifth row — the first row of the “Colored Section.” Rosa, discharged from Montgomery Fair department store, began setting up rides and garnering public support for the boycott and the NAACP. For three hundred and eighty-one days, African American citizens of Montgomery walked, carpooled, and took taxis rather than city buses. Rosa Parks was a Black civil rights activist whose refusal to give up her bus seat to a white man ignited the American civil rights movement. Because she played a leading role in the Montgomery bus boycott, she is called the ‘mother of the civil rights movement.’ Revered as one of the most influential people of the twentieth century, Rosa Parks is best known for her role in the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1956. Parks was born on February 4, 1913, to Leona and James McCauley in Tuskegee, Alabama. Leona worked as a teacher and James as a carpenter. On the evening of December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a 42-year-old African American seamstress and civil rights activist living in Montgomery, Alabama, was arrested for refusing to obey a bus driver who had ordered her and three other African American passengers to vacate their seats to make room for a white passenger who had just boarded. On a cold December evening in 1955, Rosa Parks quietly incited a revolution — by just sitting down. She was tired after spending the day at work as a department store seamstress. She stepped onto the bus for the ride home and sat in the fifth row — the first row of the " Colored Section ." On a cold December evening in 1955, Rosa Parks quietly incited a revolution — by just sitting down. She was tired after spending the day at work as a department store seamstress. She stepped onto the bus for the ride home and sat in the fifth row — the first row of the " Colored Section ." On a cold December evening in 1955, Rosa Parks quietly incited a revolution — by just sitting down. She was tired after spending the day at work as a department store seamstress. She stepped onto the bus for the ride home and sat in the fifth row — the first row of the " Colored Section ." On a cold December evening in 1955, Rosa Parks quietly incited a revolution — by just sitting down American History 1. Native American Society on the Eve of British Colonization a. As the unquestioned leader of the peaceful Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was at the same time one of the most beloved and one of the most hated men of his time. The Socialist Party aimed to become a major party; in the years prior to World War I it elected two members of Congress, over 70 mayors, innumerable state legislators and city councilors. During the first half of the 20th century, the United States existed as two nations in one. The Supreme Court ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) decreed that the legislation of two separate societies — one black and one white — was permitted as long as the two were equal. The Underground Railroad operated at night. Slaves were moved from "station" to "station" by abolitionists. These "stations" were usually homes and churches — any safe place to rest and eat before continuing on the journey to freedom, as faraway as Canada. The last land to be claimed by homesteaders was in Oklahoma. Previously dubbed "Indian Territory" by the federal government, Oklahoma had been used as a state-sized reservation of many tribes ranging from the Nez Percé in Idaho to the Cherokee of Georgia. In the mid 19th century, women in the US began demanding improved property rights, employment opportunities, and the vote. Closely allied with the anti-slavery movement, many of its key participants were active in both causes, including Lucretia Mott, Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass
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