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Rosa experiences the harsh movements of segregation (KKK) 

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Rosa experiences the harsh movements of segregation (KKK) 

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She grew up on her grandparent's farm and black people were being lynched by the farm

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Rosa Parks’ Early Life and Childhood | Rosa Parks Facts

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Rosa attended the Montgomery Industrial School. (Education) 1924-1929

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Rosa attended the Montgomery Industrial School. (Education) 1924-1929

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Rosa went to Montgomery Industrial School for grad school and then went to Washington high school for 9th and 10th grade. for 11th grade she attended Alabama State TEachers college.

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Rosa Parks with a friend. Photograph, between 1920 and 1930. Visual Materials from the Rosa Parks Papers, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress (012.00.00)
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Miss White's Montgomery Industrial School for Girls required its students to wear uniforms and forbade make-up, jewelry, movies, and dancing. Rosa completed ninth grade at Booker T. Washington Junior High in Montgomery and the tenth and eleventh grades at Alabama State Teachers College without these restrictions. She left school before graduation to care for her ailing grandmother. She is shown here as a teenager with a friend.

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Rosa's Education | Early Life and Activism | Explore | Rosa Parks: In Her Own Words | Exhibitions at the Library of Congress | Library of Congress

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Showcases rarely seen materials that offer an intimate view of Rosa Parks and documents her life and activism-creating a rich opportunity for viewers to discover new dimensions to their understanding of this seminal figure. The materials are drawn extensively from the Rosa Parks Collection, a gift to the Library of Congress from the Howard G.

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Began getting involved with the NAACP 1943

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Began getting involved with the NAACP 1943

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Rosa Parks facts for kids | National Geographic Kids

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Learn all about the African American civil rights activist who fought for equality and freedom in the USA in our Rosa Parks facts...

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Gets arrested for refusing to give up her seat on the bus 1955

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Gets arrested for refusing to give up her seat on the bus 1955

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Rosa Parks facts for kids | National Geographic Kids

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Learn all about the African American civil rights activist who fought for equality and freedom in the USA in our Rosa Parks facts...

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Rosa Parks occupies an iconic status in the civil rights movement after she refused to vacate a seat on a bus in favor of a white passenger in Montgomery, Alabama. In 1955, Parks rejected a bus driver's order to leave a row of four seats in the "colored" section once the white section had filled up and move to the back of the bus.

Her defiance sparked a successful boycott of buses in Montgomery a few days later. Residents refused to board the city's buses. Instead they carpooled, rode in Black-owned cabs, or walked, some as far as 20 miles. The boycott dealt a severe blow to the bus company's profits as dozens of public buses stood idle for months. The boycott was led by a newcomer to Montgomery named Martin Luther King, Jr.

Intentional Act

At the time, Parks led the youth division at the Montgomery branch of NAACP. She said her anger over the lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till and the failure to bring his killers to justice inspired her to make her historic stand. Four days before the incident, Parks attended a meeting where she learned of the acquittal of Till's murderers.

In her autobiography, Rosa Parks: My Story (1992), Parks declares her defiance was an intentional act: "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 42. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in."

As a result of her defiance, Parks was arrested and found guilty of disorderly conduct. NAACP joined her appeal, a case that languished in the Alabama court system. Segregation on public buses eventually ended in 1956 after a Supreme Court ruling declared it unconstitutional in Browder v. Gayle. Parks was not included as a plaintiff in the decision since her case was still pending in the state court.

"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 42. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in." - Rosa Parks

Joining the Fight in Detroit

In addition to her arrest, Parks lost her job as a seamstress at a local department store. Her husband Raymond lost his job as a barber at a local air force base after his boss forbade him to talk about the legal case. Parks and her husband left Montgomery in 1957 to find work, first traveling to Virginia and later to Detroit, Michigan.

Parks supported the militant Black power movement, whose leaders disagreed with the methods of the nonviolent movement represented by Martin Luther King. Her break with other Montgomery leaders over the future of the civil rights struggle contributed to her departure from the Southern city.

Parks was struck by the similarity in treatment of African Americans in Detroit, finding that schools and housing were just as segregated as they were in the South. She joined the movement for fair housing and lent her support to local candidate John Conyers in his bid for Congress.

After he was elected in 1965, Conyers repaid the favor by employing Parks as his secretary in his Detroit office, a position she held until her retirement in 1988. In the role, Parks worked with constituents on issues such as job discrimination, education, and affordable housing.

Parks remained active in the civil rights movement in the 1960s and helped investigate the killing of three Black teenagers in a 1967 race riot in Detroit.

Death and legacy

Over the course of her life, Parks received many honors, including NAACP's Springarn Medal in 1979, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1996, and the Congressional Gold Medal in 1999. After Parks died in Detroit in 2005 at the age of 92, she became the first woman to lie in honor in the Capitol Rotunda in Washington, D.C.

California, Missouri, Ohio, and Oregon commemorate Rosa Parks Day every year, and highways in Missouri, Michigan, and Pennsylvania bear her name.

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Rosa Parks became a civil rights icon when she refused to leave her bus seat for a white passenger in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955.

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Moved to Detroit to escape the harassment and threats 1957 

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Moved to Detroit to escape the harassment and threats 1957 

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The Rosa Parks (McCauley) and Raymond Flat, in Detroit, Michigan, was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 2021. The building is significant as the home of civil rights icon Rosa Parks, who lived in the first floor flat with her husband Raymond from 1961 to 1988. The property is located at the southwest corner of Virginia Park Street and Wildemere Avenue in what is currently known as the Wildemere Park (sometimes known historically as Virginia Park) neighborhood.

The flat is within the Twelfth Street neighborhood, one of the first of Detroit's neighborhoods that opened to middle class Blacks in the post-World War II era. Two blocks east on Linwood Street is the Shrine of the Black Madonna, where Reverend Albert B. Cleage, Jr. led the militant Black Nationalist movement. New Bethel Baptist Church, where Reverend C. L. Franklin preached and his daughter Aretha Franklin sang, is several blocks north of the Shrine, also on Linwood Street. To the south is the Northwest Goldberg neighborhood, where a number of prominent Black businesses, including Motown Records, relocated in the 1950s and 1960s as Black Bottom and Paradise Valley were razed for urban renewal. Southwest is one of the original Black neighborhoods of the city, the West Side, settled by middle-class Blacks in the 1920s.

Rosa Parks is most well known for her refusal to give up her bus seat to a White man in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955. That moment forever fixed Parks as the "mother of the civil rights movement" and as a powerful symbol of resistance, strength, and freedom. Parks' actions launched the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which ultimately ended in the desegregation of public buses. Since that day, Parks' symbolism has often overshadowed her work, both in Detroit and nationally. The significance of Rosa Parks cannot be limited to one day, nor one action. Her work for equality began well before December 1955 and continued well beyond. The flat at 3201 Virginia Park Street is the property best able to illustrate the importance and contributions of Rosa Parks during her time in Detroit.

After meeting Raymond Parks, who was already a civil rights activist, Rosa married him in 1932, and began working for the Montgomery, Alabama, chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) by traveling throughout Alabama working on voter registration drives and documenting instances of racism and persecution. After the bus boycott of 1955 Rosa and Raymond were subjected to hate and harassment. They left Alabama for Detroit in 1957. However, in their first years in Detroit the couple experienced economic and health struggles. At one point in 1960 the Pittsburgh Courier had featured a story describing their need. By 1961 their situation had improved somewhat and they were able to move into the first floor of this flat, where Rosa stayed until 1988.

In Detroit, Parks found "(t)he northern promised land that wasn't," where racism "was almost as widespread as Montgomery." It may not have been as overt as the segregated buses and schools of the South, but in Detroit Blacks were definitely second class, and the excuse that "this is not the South" was used to dismiss charges of discrimination. She almost immediately encountered the inequalities faced by African Americans in securing equal employment and housing, as evidenced by her difficulties in finding a job and a permanent place to live.

Parks was aware of her status as a symbol, she was often a part of significant events, yet did not have a prominent role. Rather than a reflection of her significance, she identified the cause of this as the result of a patriarchal system. It was a time, she observed, when "women's rights hadn't become a popular cause yet." At the same time, Parks did not seek a prominent role and did not care to a be a public figure. In August of 1963, Parks traveled to Washington D.C. to participate in the March on Washington. Although she was prominently featured on the dais at the Lincoln Memorial and was among the six women honored in the "Tribute to Women" at the event, Parks and her fellow women activists were shunted into a different march route, and it was not lost on her or the other women that they were being marginalized despite their prominent role in the movement.

After nearly twenty years in the civil rights movement, Parks secured her first paid political position when newly elected Congressman John Conyers hired Parks to work in his office in March 1965. Conyers later said that Rosa Parks was the first person he wanted to hire for his congressional staff, considering her the most important civil rights activist in the state. While Parks was officially an administrative assistant, and she did perform tasks like filing and answering the telephone (greatly surprising some constituents), she also served as an informal legislative aide, traveling around the city to visit constituents, gather information, and represent Conyers at meetings. As a Black Congressman, Conyers often received communications from constituents reporting discrimination in housing and employment, and his office was reported to be a "hotbed of local and national black political organizing," an atmosphere that may have appealed to Parks from her days working for the NAACP in Alabama.

According to biographer Douglas Brinkley, "The Parkses' flat functioned as a bit of a salon in Virginia Park, filled with robust discussion and debate. Many of the young men who came by greatly admired Malcolm X, like the Parkses did, and shared their feelings about the importance of the continued struggle." The flat was just a few blocks from Reverend Cleage's Central Congregational Church, where in October 1966 she attended Stokely Carmichael's speech on Black Power; during that speech, Carmichael singled her out as his hero. Edward Vaughn, a leader of the radical Black Consciousness movement, later remembered that Parks was highly active in the movement. "Honest to God, almost every meeting I went to, she was always there," he said. Vaughn had opened the first African American bookstore in Detroit not far from the Parks flat, and it became the intellectual center of the movement. Parks and her husband supported the bookstore and often participated in the intellectual and political discussions held there.

The role of Rosa Parks in the civil rights movement before and after the Montgomery bus boycott has often been overshadowed by that event. Her image has, in the collective conscious, been fixed by that moment and solidified by the fact that those who interviewed her or wrote about her in the decades between the boycott and her death focused almost exclusively on her experience and the legacy of that event. Yet, as her biographers have pointed out, Parks spent more than half her life in Detroit, not Alabama, and she used the fame she had acquired following the boycott to bring attention to racial inequality in employment, housing, and public accommodations in Detroit and across the country. From the March on Washington in 1963 to boycotts in the 1980s, from the NAACP to the Black Power movement to anti-apartheid, Parks made her presence felt as a leader of the civil rights movement. Throughout those years, she lived at 3201 Virginia Park Street.

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Rosa and Raymond Parks Flat (U.S. National Park Service)

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The Rosa Parks (McCauley) and Raymond Flat, in Detroit, Michigan, was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 2021. The building is significant as the home of civil rights icon Rosa Parks, who lived in the first floor flat with her husband Raymond from 1961 to 1988.

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1963-1965 Participated in marches for various movements for equal rights for black people

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1963-1965 Participated in marches for various movements for equal rights for black people

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Bob Adelman, photographer. Rosa Parks seated as an honored guest at the March on Washington, 1963. Photograph. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress (043.00.00)
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The Southern Christian Leadership Conference invited Rosa Parks to participate in the 1963 March on Washington. Shortly after arriving, Rosa discovered that she and other female civil rights leaders would march in a separate procession and no woman would appear as a speaker. They protested the exclusion. At the last minute, A. Philip Randolph added a "Tribute to Women." Daisy Bates briefly spoke during the official program, and Rosa was recognized.

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March on Washington | Detroit 1957 and Beyond | Explore | Rosa Parks: In Her Own Words | Exhibitions at the Library of Congress | Library of Congress

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Showcases rarely seen materials that offer an intimate view of Rosa Parks and documents her life and activism-creating a rich opportunity for viewers to discover new dimensions to their understanding of this seminal figure. The materials are drawn extensively from the Rosa Parks Collection, a gift to the Library of Congress from the Howard G.

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Worked in Congressman John Conyers's District office 1965-1988

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Worked in Congressman John Conyers's District office 1965-1988

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Responsibility for making an independent legal assessment of an item and securing any necessary permissions ultimately rests with persons desiring to use the item.

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Rosa Parks Collection Items Housed in the Prints and Photographs Division
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Reproduction Number: LC-DIG-ppmsca-38701 (digital file from original item)

Call Number: LOT 15045, no. 538 [item] [P&P]

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[Rosa Parks and U.S. Congressman John Conyers, Jr., picketing in front of General Motors corporate headquarters, Detroit, Michigan]

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1 photograph : color print ; sheet 15.2 x 10.1 cm (4 x 6 format) | Photograph shows Representative John Conyers and aide, Rosa Parks, picketing General Motors headquarters in Detroit, in protest of the company's decision to close five Michigan plants. Conyers holds a sign reading: "GM has made the most inhumane decision in its history".