Early Life
Rosa Parks was born on February 4, 1913 in Tuskegee, Alabama to James McCauley and Leona Edwards. She suffered from poor health and had chronic tonsillitis at a young age. He moved to Pine Level with his mother when his parents separated. Then he grew up on a farm with his grandparents, his mother, and his younger brother, Sylvester. When the Ku Klux Klan marched into his neighborhood, Grandpa Rosa guarded the door with a shotgun. The Montgomery Industrial School where Rosa went to school was burned to the ground twice by fires. At the age of 19, he married Rosa Raymond Parks in his mother’s home. Raymond the barber of Montgomery. Raymond encouraged Rosa to get a high school diploma, and she did. It was then that less than 7% of the African American population had passports in 1933. She had many jobs from a domestic worker to a hospital aide. In December of 1943, she became a member of the Montgomery Chapter of the NACCP.
Montgomery Bus Boycott
After a day at the grocery store, Rose boarded the Cleveland Avenue bus at approximately 6 p.m. on the Thursday before December. He paid for the fare, and sat in the empty black seats in the first row. When the bus pulled up, the driver asked Parks and three others to give up their seats to the whites standing here. Three others moved, but not Parks. The driver said, “Why don’t you stop?”, and Parks replied, “I don’t think I should stop.” He called the police to arrest Parks. E.D. Nixon and Clifford Durr were released from prison on December 2. A few days later, Parks was tried on riot charges. She was found guilty and fined $10, plus $4 in court costs.
Work Cited: wikipedia.org
