Rosa Parks
Civil Rights Leader — born 1913
Rosa Parks was a famous African-American civil rights activist, also known as ‘the first lady of civil rights’ and ‘the mother of the freedom movement’.
Rosa Parks was an American civil-rights activist whose December 1, 1955 refusal to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery, Alabama public bus sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott — one of the foundational moments of the modern American civil-rights movement. She was born Rosa Louise McCauley on February 4, 1913, in Tuskegee, Alabama. Her parents separated when she was two, and she was raised by her mother and maternal grandparents on a small farm in Pine Level, Alabama. She left school at 11 to care for her terminally ill grandmother and her chronically ill mother, eventually completing her high-school diploma at age 21.
She married Raymond Parks — a barber and longtime member of the NAACP — in 1932. She joined the Montgomery NAACP in 1943 and served as the chapter secretary, working alongside chapter president E.D. Nixon on NAACP voter-registration efforts and on civil-rights legal-defense cases including the 1944 case of Recy Taylor (a young Black woman who had been gang-raped by six white men in Abbeville, Alabama).
The December 1, 1955 incident occurred on a Montgomery city bus operated by James F. Blake. Parks was sitting in the "colored" section of the bus when the white section filled up, and the bus driver demanded that she and three other Black passengers move further back to make room for additional white passengers. The other three Black passengers complied; Parks did not. She was arrested and charged with violating Alabama's segregation statute — and her arrest became the legal case around which the Montgomery Bus Boycott was organized.
The 381-day Montgomery Bus Boycott — led by 26-year-old Baptist minister Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. — successfully forced the Montgomery city government to integrate its public buses on December 21, 1956 (following the November 13, 1956 US Supreme Court decision in Browder v. Gayle that struck down the Alabama bus-segregation laws). Parks's arrest and the boycott made King a national civil-rights leader and launched the modern American civil-rights movement. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1996 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 1999. She died on October 24, 2005, at age 92, in Detroit, Michigan.
Her name Rosa is from the Latin rosa meaning "rose." Rosa has been continuously climbing in American naming since the 2010s vintage-revival wave.
About the name Rosa
Gender: Female · Origin: German
Noted Protector