Parks, Rosa Louise (1913-2005), an African American civil rights activist, became best known for her role in a boycott of the Montgomery , Alabama, bus system. The protest began in late 1955 and lasted over a year. Parks triggered the boycott when she refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a bus. Her action helped bring about the civil rights movement in the United States.
Parks was arrested on Dec. 1, 1955, for violating a city law requiring that Black and white passengers sit in separate rows on buses. She refused to give up her seat in the middle of the bus when a white man wished to sit in her row. The front rows were for white people only. The law required Black people to leave their seats in the next rows when all seats in the front rows were taken and other white people still wanted seats.
Even before Parks’s arrest, Montgomery’s Black leaders had been discussing a protest against racial segregation on the city’s buses. Parks allowed the leaders to use her arrest to spark a boycott of the bus system. The leaders formed an organization to run the boycott. Martin Luther King, Jr. —then a Baptist minister in Montgomery—was chosen as president.
From Dec. 5, 1955, to Dec. 20, 1956, thousands of Black residents refused to ride Montgomery’s buses. Their boycott ended when the Supreme Court of the United States declared segregated seating on the city’s buses unconstitutional. The boycott’s success encouraged other mass protests demanding civil rights for Black citizens. 
Rosa Louise McCauley was born on Feb. 4, 1913, in Tuskegee, Alabama. She attended Alabama State Teachers College. In 1932, she married Raymond Parks, a barber. She held a variety of jobs and, in 1943, became one of the first women to join the Montgomery Chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) . She served as the organization’s secretary from 1943 to 1956.
Parks lost her job as a seamstress as a result of the Montgomery boycott. She moved to Detroit , Michigan, in 1957. From 1967 to 1988, she worked on the Detroit staff of John Conyers, Jr. , a Democratic member of the U.S. House of Representatives. In 1979, she was awarded the Spingarn Medal for her work in civil rights. She wrote an autobiography, Rosa Parks: My Story (1992). In 1996, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom . In 1999, she was awarded a Congressional Gold Medal. Parks died on Oct. 24, 2005. She became the first woman to lie in honor—a distinction made for distinguished private citizens—in the U.S. Capitol. A statue of Parks was dedicated at Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol in 2013.
