October 25, 2005
Rosa Parks, best known for her refusal to give up her seat on a segregated Montgomery bus to a white passenger, died in Detroit at the age of 92. Her arrest in 1955 prompted a bus boycott, thrust the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. into the national spotlight and led to major federal civil rights legislation. Although these events made Parks a household name, she had become active in civil rights more than a decade earlier with the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP. A native of Tuskegee, Parks moved in 1957 to Detroit and resumed her earlier work as a seamstress but remained involved as a spokeswoman for civil rights causes. She returned to Alabama in 1965 to take part in the Selma-to-Montgomery march. Parks later worked as an aide to U.S. Rep. John Conyers, managing his Detroit office until she retired in 1988. In later years, she received numerous awards for her life’s work, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1996.
Read more at Encyclopedia of Alabama.
Alabamian Rosa Parks (1913-2005) is renowned as “the mother of the civil rights movement.” Her arrest for refusing to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery bus in 1955 became a rallying point for the emerging civil rights movement in Alabama. Parks has been honored by presidents and received numerous awards, including the Congressional Gold Medal. (From Encyclopedia of Alabama, photo courtesy of the Library of Congress)
Rosa Parks is shown here during a symbolic ride in the formerly whites-only section of a city bus in Montgomery on Dec. 21, 1956, the day the U.S. Supreme Court banned segregation of the city’s public transit vehicles. (From Encyclopedia of Alabama, photo courtesy of the Library of Congress)
This mug shot of Rosa Parks was taken when she was arrested in February 1956 for protesting during the Montgomery bus boycott. The image was discovered in 2004 when a Montgomery County chief deputy found it in storage. (From Encyclopedia of Alabama, photo courtesy of Montgomery County Archives)
Virginia Durr and Rosa Parks photographed in 1981 in South Hadley, Massachusetts, likely taken when the two women received honorary doctorates from Mount Holyoke College. (From Encyclopedia of Alabama, photo courtesy of the Birmingham Public Library Archives)
The U.S. Postal Service released a commemorative stamp honoring civil rights icon Rosa Parks in February 2013. Artist Thomas Blackshear II created an original painting for the stamp, based on a 1950s photograph. (From Encyclopedia of Alabama, photo courtesy of the U.S. Postal Service)
Portrait of Rosa Parks, c. 1976-1981. (Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Wikipedia)
Rosa Parks Congressional Gold Medal presented to Rosa Parks on Nov. 28, 1999. (Designed by Artis Lane, U.S. Mint, Wikipedia)
For more on Alabama’s Bicentennial, visit Alabama 200.