Rosa Parks: An ordinary woman, an extraordinary life

Rosa Parks, the mother of the civil rights movement, died at her home Monday evening of natural causes. She was 92.

Parks was best known for her civil disobedience in 1953, when the 42-year old seamstress refused to give up her seat on the bus for a white man. Her refusal triggered a 381-day boycott of the segregated bus system in Montgomery, Alabama organized by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Rosa Louise Parks was born in Tuskegee Alabama on February 4, 1913, the oldest child of James McCauley, a carpenter and Leona Edwards, a schoolteacher. She married Raymond Edwards, a barber, in 1932. He was active in civil rights causes and inspired Rosa to get involved.

Her high school education was interrupted due to a family illness, but after she met Raymond she went back to school and became one of the few blacks in Montgomery to have a high school diploma.

Her career started at a local hospital and during World War II, she worked at an Army Air Force base. Parks and her husband were members of a fledgling voting rights group called the Voters’ League, for which she kept a list of all the voters in Montgomery.

In 1943, she became a member of the NAACP and served as secretary for the Montgomery division.

As a result of her public stand for civil rights, Parks was unable to find work in Alabama, so her family moved to Detroit in 1957 to escape harassment and threats. She worked as an aid to U.S. Representative John Conyers in Detroit, a position she held from 1965 until she retired in 1988.

In 1987, she started the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development, which was devoted to developing leadership among Detroit’s young people and initiating them into the civil rights struggle.

In 1992, “Rosa Parks: My Story” was published and in 1996 she was awarded the nations highest medal of honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.