Rosa Parks: The Mother of Civil Rights

Rosa Parks: The Mother of Civil Rights

The Jim Crow laws of the South paved the life of Rosa Louis McCauley Parks. She was an African-American born in Tuskegee, Alabama on February 4, 1913, whose parents were James McCauley, a carpenter, and Leona Edwards, a school teacher. When Parks' parents separated, in 1915, they went to live on her mother parent's farm in Pine Level, a small community on the outside of Montgomery. On the farm, Parks had often heard, from her grandparents, stories of slavery and the Emancipation Proclamation, an order, in1863 proclaiming freedom to all slaves. She would later become one of many women involved in the Civil Rights Movement, but her stand for equality would spread nationwide. Parks challenged segregation laws through protest and public support, and thus became known as the Mother of Civil Rights.

In Pine Level, Parks received her primary education after being home schooled by her mother until she turned eleven. She found it difficult to understand why Blacks had freedom but not equality, "if we were a free people [why are] we [...] deprived of the better things" (Litwack 23). She reacted on racial discrimination, as a young adult, by climbing stairs instead of using the black only elevator and by walking home from work because of the bus seating laws.

Parks' first supportive protest centered on the Scottsboro Boys. They were nine young black boys who were wrongly accused of raping two white women, while riding on a rail train in Scottsboro, Alabama, in 1931. Raymond and Rosa Parks raised money to support the boys' rights to a fair trial. The boys' innocence made it important for activists and supporters to react because of the fear of a lynching. The protest helped the Parks and other activists to free five of the nine boys from imprisonment and death. The other four boys' convictions were later overturned (Altman 214).

In 1933, Parks graduated from Alabama High School. Then she attended Montgomery Industrial School, after her marriage to Raymond Parks, a barber and civil rights activist and worked as a seamstress for a local department store. She joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and became the secretary of the Montgomery branch in 1943, and worked on registering black voters.

Parks and her husband joined the Montgomery Voters League because of racial inequality problems in the South. She finally received her registration to vote, after being denied two years straight, she had managed to overcome the hurdles of the literacy test and the poll taxes that were setup to exclude blacks (Sullivan 16). The civil rights leaders began focusing on the importance of getting voters registered, if equality was to change.

The strength force behind the civil rights movement was the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), an organization setup to help increase the number of black voters across the South. Parks became a member, after the closing of the NAACP branches in Alabama, and participated in the Selma-to-Montgomery March for Voting Rights in 1965. The voting rights struggle ended after President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Act of 1965. The honorees of the civil rights activists Parks, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Coretta Scott King were named in the Voting Rights Act Reauthorization and Amendments Act of 2006 (United 1).

Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee held a workshop on July in 1955 that help people train for civil right activism. Parks attended the workshop with help from her friend, Virginia Durr, a well-known white activist from Montgomery, Alabama. At the workshop she saw Martin Luther King, Jr. for the first time and had ever been in an atmosphere of equality (Rouse 103). Her experience at the workshop inspired her to challenge the segregation of the bus system. Parks and others from Montgomery do not believe that people would support the fight of segregation. When she returned in 1956, it was one hundred days into an event that would change history, the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

The arrest of Parks, a forty-two-year-old seamstress and a well-known, middle-class citizen, sparked the first nonviolent protest, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, on December 1, 1955, when she refused to give up her seat to a white man. She was treated with respect and dignity at the jail. After her release, the NAACP president, E.D. Nixon met with her and other civil leaders. At the meeting, they decided that Parks would be the perfect person to challenge the desegregation laws on transportation and the U.S. Supreme Court. Parks pleaded not guilty, but was found guilty to Alabama's segregation