Rosa Parks

Rosa Louise McCauley was born in 1913 in Tuskegee, Alabama, raised by her mother and grandparents on a Black-owned farm where her grandfather sat up at night with a shotgun against the Klan. She married the activist Raymond Parks in 1932, joined the Montgomery NAACP in 1943 and served as its branch secretary for twelve years, investigating sexual assaults of Black women by white men in cases the law would not touch. On the evening of 1 December 1955 — a forty-two-year-old seamstress riding the Cleveland Avenue bus home from work — she refused the driver's order to surrender her seat to a white man so he could sit in a row that had previously held Black passengers. She was arrested. The Women's Political Council, who had been waiting for the right test case, called a one-day boycott; the Montgomery Improvement Association elected the new pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist, Martin Luther King Jr., to lead it; the boycott lasted 381 days and ended in the Supreme Court ruling Browder v. Gayle striking down bus segregation. Parks lost her job, was hounded with death threats, moved to Detroit in 1957, worked for Congressman John Conyers from 1965 to 1988, and lived to see herself become an icon. She died in Detroit in 2005 at ninety-two, and lay in honour in the Capitol rotunda — the first woman ever to do so.

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