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Video and article about Rosa Parks and how her refusal to give up her seat on a bus helped ignite the start of the Civil Rights Movement.

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Rosa Parks' Early Life

Rosa Louise McCauley was born in Tuskegee, Alabama, on February 4, 1913. She moved with her parents, James and Leona McCauley, to Pine Level, Alabama, at age 2 to reside with Leona's parents. Her brother, Sylvester, was born in 1915, and shortly after that her parents separated.

Did you know? When Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat in 1955, it wasn't the first time she'd clashed with driver James Blake. Parks stepped onto his very crowded bus on a chilly day 12 years earlier, paid her fare at the front, then resisted the rule in place for Black people to disembark and re-enter through the back door. She stood her ground until Blake pulled her coat sleeve, enraged, to demand her cooperation. Parks left the bus rather than give in.

Rosa's mother was a teacher, and the family valued education. Rosa moved to Montgomery, Alabama, at age 11 and eventually attended high school there, a laboratory school at the Alabama State Teachers' College for Negroes. She left at 16, early in 11th grade, because she needed to care for her dying grandmother and, shortly thereafter, her chronically ill mother. In 1932, at 19, she married Raymond Parks, a self-educated man 10 years her senior who worked as a barber and was a long-time member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ( NAACP). He supported Rosa in her efforts to earn her high-school diploma, which she ultimately did the following year.

Rosa Parks: Roots of Activism

Raymond and Rosa, who worked as a seamstress, became respected members of Montgomery's large African American community. Co-existing with white people in a city governed by " Jim Crow " (segregation) laws, however, was fraught with daily frustrations: Black people could attend only certain (inferior) schools, could drink only from specified water fountains and could borrow books only from the "Black" library, among other restrictions.

Although Raymond had previously discouraged her out of fear for her safety, in December 1943, Rosa also joined the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP and became chapter secretary. She worked closely with chapter president Edgar Daniel (E.D.) Nixon. Nixon was a railroad porter known in the city as an advocate for Black people who wanted to register to vote, and also as president of the local branch of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters union.

December 1, 1955: Rosa Parks Is Arrested

On Thursday, December 1, 1955, the 42-year-old Rosa Parks was commuting home from a long day of work at the Montgomery Fair department store by bus. Black residents of Montgomery often avoided municipal buses if possible because they found the Negroes-in-back policy so demeaning. Nonetheless, 70 percent or more riders on a typical day were Black, and on this day Rosa Parks was one of them.

Segregation was written into law; the front of a Montgomery bus was reserved for white citizens, and the seats behind them for Black citizens. However, it was only by custom that bus drivers had the authority to ask a Black person to give up a seat for a white rider. There were contradictory Montgomery laws on the books: One said segregation must be enforced, but another, largely ignored, said no person (white or Black) could be asked to give up a seat even if there were no other seat on the bus available.

Nonetheless, at one point on the route, a white man had no seat because all the seats in the designated "white" section were taken. So the driver told the riders in the four seats of the first row of the "colored" section to stand, in effect adding another row to the "white" section. The three others obeyed. Parks did not.

"People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired," wrote Parks in her autobiography, "but that isn't true. I was not tired physically... No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in."

Eventually, two police officers approached the stopped bus, assessed the situation and placed Parks in custody.

Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott

Although Parks used her one phone call to contact her husband, word of her arrest had spread quickly and E.D. Nixon was there when Parks was released on bail later that evening. Nixon had hoped for years to find a courageous Black person of unquestioned honesty and integrity to become the plaintiff in a case that might become the test of the validity of segregation laws. Sitting in Parks' home, Nixon convinced Parks-and her husband and mother-that Parks was that plaintiff. Another idea arose as well: The Black population of Montgomery would boycott the buses on the day of Parks' trial, Monday, December 5. By midnight, 35,000 flyers were being mimeographed to be sent home with Black schoolchildren, informing their parents of the planned boycott.

On December 5, Parks was found guilty of violating segregation laws, given a suspended sentence and fined $10 plus $4 in court costs. Meanwhile, Black participation in the boycott was much larger than even optimists in the community had anticipated. Nixon and some ministers decided to take advantage of the momentum, forming the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) to manage the boycott, and they elected Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.-new to Montgomery and just 26 years old-as the MIA's president.

As appeals and related lawsuits wended their way through the courts, all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, the Montgomery Bus Boycott engendered anger in much of Montgomery's white population as well as some violence, and Nixon's and Dr. King's homes were bombed. The violence didn't deter the boycotters or their leaders, however, and the drama in Montgomery continued to gain attention from the national and international press.

On November 13, 1956, the Supreme Court ruled that bus segregation was unconstitutional; the boycott ended December 20, a day after the Court's written order arrived in Montgomery. Parks-who had lost her job and experienced harassment all year-became known as "the mother of the civil rights movement."

Rosa Parks's Life After the Boycott

Facing continued harassment and threats in the wake of the boycott, Parks, along with her husband and mother, eventually decided to move to Detroit, where Parks' brother resided. Parks became an administrative aide in the Detroit office of Congressman John Conyers Jr. in 1965, a post she held until her 1988 retirement. Her husband, brother and mother all died of cancer between 1977 and 1979. In 1987, she co-founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development, to serve Detroit's youth.

In the years following her retirement, she traveled to lend her support to civil-rights events and causes and wrote an autobiography, Rosa Parks: My Story. In 1999, Parks was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest honor the United States bestows on a civilian. (Other recipients have included George Washington, Thomas Edison, Betty Ford and Mother Teresa.) When she died at age 92 on October 24, 2005, she became the first woman in the nation's history to lie in honor at the U.S. Capitol.

HISTORY Vault: Black History

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Rosa Parks: Bus Boycott, Civil Rights & Facts | HISTORY

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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 inspired the leaders of the local Black community to organize the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

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Several of the 10 videos have links that are no longer working, but the ones that work are worth listening to.

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Nina Simone To Billie Holiday: 10 Civil Rights Protest Songs

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The Civil Rights movement incorporated jazz, folk, R&B and gospel in its music to help change America in the 1950s and 1960s.

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School segregation

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If you are reading One Crazy Summer by Rita Williams Garcia, watch this video to learn a little bit more about who the Black Panthers were and what they did to help the Civil Rights Movement.

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Half a century has passed since the Black Panthers first came on the scene. They were champions of equality to some -- dangerous subversives to others. The surviving Panthers, including one of its most prominent leaders, are still working to make their party's case, as Lee Cowan reports:

The Black Panther Party may have dissolved more than 30 years ago, but you'd never know it from the looks of a recent gathering at an Oakland restaurant.

They had reconvened briefly to celebrate the 80th birthday of one of the Black Panthers' founders, Bobby Seale.

He's a little rounder these days, and perhaps a little slower. But at 80, Seale hasn't lost a flicker of the fire that helped change the political landscape of the 1960s.

"This was all 'power to all the people,'" he said. "We was beyond just power to black people."

Time hasn't dulled the sharpness of their swagger; the leather jackets, the berets, and the guns. For many, the Black Panthers and their defiant image remain as relevant and as controversial today as ever.

Take Beyoncé: When her dancers borrowed the Panthers' iconic look at last year's Super Bowl, both praise and criticism flew.

"It was a complete revelation to how the Panthers continue to capture the imagination," said Rene de Guzman, who recently curated the "All Power to the People" exhibit at the Oakland Museum. It drew some of the biggest crowds he's ever seen.

"Not in my wildest dreams could I imagine a Black Panther show being a blockbuster," he said.

Perhaps that because the Panthers have become as much pop culture as political party. Their message was branded with contemporary but often inflammatory artwork. They were the first to use the term "pig" to refer to the police, which to this day remains as offensive to police officers as the Black Panthers intended it to be.

Why a pig? "Well, a pig for them was a dirty animal, it was an animal without morals, and it was also a very dangerous animal," said de Guzman.

Their approach raised eyebrows and tempers all around the country. But they were not without structure. Seale wrote a strict 10-point platform -- the Party's founding principles -- on a legal pad that somehow managed to survived all these years.

He hasn't seen it in years, but Seale can recite every word to this day. It demanded (among other things) access to better housing, education, and an end to police brutality.

Cowan asked, "Do you think this is still relevant today?"

"Every nickel of it," he replied.

The Panthers first got national attention when members marched, armed, to the floor of the California State Assembly, taking advantage of the gun laws at the time that allowed a firearm to be carried openly.

It wasn't just a stunt; it was an extension of the Panthers' armed citizen patrols. They had been formed to monitor -- some would say intimidate -- the police.

"The cops said, 'You can't observe me,' and we'd recite the law," Seale said. "'You cannot remove personal property without due process of law. Step back! You cannot touch my weapon. It is private property!' And some black dude standing there said, 'Man, what kind of negroes are these?'"

Seale was Chairman of the Black Panthers, while Huey P. Newton was its Minister of Defense. In 1967 he was arrested for fatally shooting an Oakland police officer. "Free Huey" became the party's rallying cry, and after four trials, Newton's case was eventually dismissed.

"How much did Huey's trial really galvanize the movement?" Cowan asked.

"It wasn't Huey; Dr. Martin Luther King getting killed galvanized the movement," Seale said.

The tone of a Black Panther rally was more in-your-face than the often polite protests of Dr. King. Although they claimed this was all about self-defense, they also called for revolution -- a violent one, if need be.

"You can jail the revolutionaries, but you can't jail a revolution!" they chanted at one rally.

Many critics saw it not as a movement, but a criminal enterprise filled with those willing to sacrifice anything for the cause.

"We knew that the system that had enslaved us could not remain in place, because it was that system of capitalism on the backs of African slaves that created our state of oppression," said Elaine Brown, who rose to become the first female chair of the Black Panther Party. "For me there was no turning back. Once you say you believe in something and you're ready to live and die for it, then that's what you do."

Some did die, on both sides of the struggle. When police raided a Panther headquarters in Chicago, a shootout left one of the movement's most charismatic leaders, Fred Hampton, dead. And all hell broke loose.

The Panthers called it murder; police called it self-defense.

"The immediate, violent criminal reaction of the occupants in shooting at announced police officers, emphasizes the extreme viciousness of the Black Panther Party," said Cook County State's Attorney Edward Hanrahan following the raid.

"We were, from the beginning almost, the targets of the Federal government," said Brown. "J. Edgar Hoover, by 1968, was saying the Black Panther party was the greatest threat to internal security of the United States."

Hoover even brought his concerns about the Panthers to President Nixon, who on recordings can be heard on a telephone call pondering how the FBI could be used against them:

Nixon: "On a case-by-case basis, you could determine when you would want the Bureau to get in. In other words, where you sort of had the scent of the smell of a national conspiracy thing. You know, the kind of thing like the Panthers, and all that..."
Hoover: "Like the Black Panthers, the Students for a Democratic Society."
Nixon: "Something where it's basically that kind of an action."

"Found the tape, baby -- smoking gun evidence that the Nixon administration, starting with Nixon himself, this dude was giving directives to get rid of these Black Panthers," said Seale.

Age has mellowed Bobby Seale's view of marrying activism and guns. Case in point: the Black Lives Matter movement, also born in Oakland, that is still fighting police brutality 50 years later.

Cowan asked, "When kids come up and ask your advice today about guns, you tell them?"

"You don't need guns today," Seale replied. "The cell phone is the best piece of technology we got to observe cops. You can have an international cop watch program without a gun."

That's where Seale says the Panthers went wrong -- letting their militant protests overshadow what he saw as their larger purpose: community service.

The Panthers organized free breakfast programs for kids long before public schools in this country started doing the very same things. There were health clinics, too; food drives; voter registration drives; even an ambulance service.

"The purpose of the Panther programs was to provide a model, a living model for what American government should be doing," said Stephen Shames, who documented it all as the Panthers' unofficial photographer.

It was the softer side of the Panthers that his photos often captured. Many never saw the light of day until he compiled them into a book for the Panthers' 50th anniversary.

"Panthers were parents," Shames said. "Panthers were lovers. You see the Panthers with their wives and girlfriends. You see the Panthers with their children. And you just see the tenderness. I think that's what didn't come out with the militant image that was in the media of marching, wearing the leather jackets, wearing the berets."

"The party was not just some group of thugs, or social do-gooders, or whatever, do-badders, if you like," said Elaine Brown. "We were an organization that had goals and had an agenda and had an ideology, and that shapes everything I do right now, and has for the past 40 years."

Brown continued working as a community organizer and activist long after the Black Panthers began to fray as a party in the early '80s. She worked for prison reform then, and still does.

She recently organized an urban garden, for example, to help inmates who she says were jailed unfairly because of their race get a new start by selling the produce that they plant and pick.

"This is a continuation of what we did do in many ways," Brown said. "It's not exactly, but it's what I can do."

A bright corner in this still-impoverished section of West Oakland where the Panthers were born.

By the way, it wasn't just former Black Panthers who were at that party for Bobby Seale -- there were plenty of young activists there, too, looking to an older generation for answers about race and justice, and how best to affect the change that the Panthers had hoped would have come long ago.

For more info:

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