Mother of the Moder Day Civil Rights Movement

Rosa Louise McCauley was born in Tuskegee, Alabama to a carpenter, James McCauley, and a teacher, Leona McCauley. At the age of 11, she went to a private school founded by liberal minded women in Montgomery. Her mother told her as she was growing up to "take advantage of the opportunities, no matter how few they were. As she grew up, she didn’t have any civil rights. She went to Alabama State Teachers College. After she graduated, she married Raymond Parks and settled down in Montgomery. Together they joined a chapter of the NAACP in 1943 to improve the African-American segregation in the south.
December 1, 1955 was a turning point for Mrs. Parks and for all historians. She took a seat in the front row of the "colored" section of a Montgomery bus. As the bus started to fill up, the driver ordered Mrs. Parks to leave the front of the bus so a white man could sit down not next to an African American. She refused to move. The bus driver threatened to call the police. Mrs. Parks replied, "You may do that."The word of her arrest spread quickly.
That incident led to the formation of the Montgomery Improvement Association, lead by Dr. Martin Luther King, a young pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. The Association called for a boycott of the city owned bus company. It lasted 382 days and brought the Association a lot of attention. It proved to the world that one community could unite and organize a successful protest movement.
After the protest, A Supreme Court decision struck down on the Montgomery ordinance under which Mrs. Parks was fined. They also outlawed racial segregation on public transportation.
Mrs. Parks and her husband moved to Detroit, Michigan in 1957 where Mrs. Parks served on the staff of U.S. Representative John Conyers. In her honor, the Southern Christian Leadership Council established an annual Rosa Parks Award.
Her husband passed in 1977. She then founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development. It sponsors an annual summer program for teenagers called Pathways to Freedom.
Mrs. Parks passed away in 2005 at the age of 92 in Detroit. Rosa Parks changed many lives and liberated many people.