Rosa Parks

Sylvia Phillips

Feb 1, 20233 min read

Updated: Jun 12, 2023

1913-2005

Birthplace: Tuskegee, Alabama

Civil Right icon
Presidential Medal Of Freedom Award
Author

Rosa Parks was home schooled by her mother until the age of 11. She had to leave secondary school to care for her ailing grandmother. At the encouragement of her husband, she finished her high school classes and achieved her diploma in 1933.

She became active in defending The Scottsboro Boys, a group of Black men who had been falsely accused of raping two white women in 1931. This trial is widely considered the beginning of the Civil Rights movement in the United States.

Parks lived in Alabama during the “Jim Crow” South where voting was made almost impossible for black people. She tried to register three times between 1943 and 1945 having to fill out a difficult questionnaire, a Jim Crow-era voter suppression tactic to keep Black people away from the polls. Prepared to fight for the right to vote legally on her third attempt in 1945 Parks wrote down her answers so she could challenge the registrar who saw her do this and approved her application. On top of the test she had to pay $1.50 each year to be eligible to vote. The “poll tax” was $18 in total (equivalent to $296 dollars today.)

Rosa Parks is known as “The Mother of Modern-Day Civil Rights Movement."

Long before refusing to give up her seat for a white man and being arrested, (prisoner 7053) on December 1, 1955, charged with and convicted of civil disobedience, Parks had fought for desegregation, voting rights, and was an established organizer and leader in the Civil Rights movement. Rosa and her husband were also active members of the League of Women voters.

“People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.” – Rosa Parks

Convicted and fined $14.00 including court costs. She lost the case on appeal due to a technicality.

Her arrest for refusing to relinquish her seat started the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott. A unanimous agreement was made that black people would boycott the buses until fair seating, fair treatment and black drivers were hired. The boycott lasted 381 days. This resulted in 75% loss of riders. Detrimental to the finances of the public bus companies, new laws went into place that ended segregation on public buses. The bus boycott is considered one of the most successful uprisings against racial segregation. Rosa Parks lost her job as a seamstress at a local department store after her arrest. A job she held for seven years.

After the bus boycott, Parks and her husband moved to Hampton, Virginia and later permanently to Detroit, Michigan where her work in the Detroit civil rights movement proved invaluable.

After a life of working to give financially and physically to equality causes she suffered from financial and health troubles. Nearly evicted from her home in Michigan, local community members and churches came together to support this amazing woman.

On October 24th, 2005 at the age of 92, she died of natural causes leaving behind a legacy of resistance against racial discrimination and injustice. Four years after her death, Barack Obama became the 44th and first African American President of the United States.

Some of Rosa Parks' awards and accomplishments:

1979 NAACP awarded Parks with Spingarn Medal their highest honor

1992 Authored "My Story" by Rosa Parks

1996 Recipient – Presidential Medal of Freedom

1999 Named by Time Magazine as one of the most influential figures of the century

2000 The Rosa Parks Library and Museum dedicated at Troy University in Montgomery, Alabama

2005 First woman to lie in honor in the Capitol Rotunda

2006 Statue of Rosa Parks placed in the National Statuary Hall in Washington, D.C.

To create Rosa Parks I knew I wanted to have her sitting holding her “ arrest number”

I wanted the chair I created to feel like the bus seat she was on. I felted the chair and then applied a heavy coat of wax, having no idea what I was doing but very pleased with the results. Her glasses are wireless in the photo so I used thin wire for frames, wiped gold paint on them and used heavy plastic for the “lens”.