Happy Birthday, Rosa Parks, Mother of the Civil Rights Movement

Jim Crow never was a real person; the name comes from a 19th-century minstrel song. Jim Crow laws became the country's legal means to segregate races in hospitals, public schools, transportation and many more places. Jim Crow was still alive and well when Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger. It turns out that many people have misunderstood Parks' circumstances on that day. Parks said that when she disobeyed the bus driver's orders to give up her seat, she was not sitting in the front of the bus and her feet did not hurt, as many accounts of her story relate. When she was growing up in Montgomery, she had long "felt that it was not right to be deprived of freedom when we were living in the Home of the Brave and Land of the Free." That day on the bus, she continued, "I had made up my mind that I would not give in any longer to legally imposed racial segregation." Parks' explanation of that day's events is available at the Academy of Achievement Web site in audio and video format.

Parks was not the first African-American woman arrested in Montgomery for refusing to give up her seat; two other women came before her. But after Parks' display of civil disobedience one African-American woman said, "They've messed with the wrong one now." The famous 381-day bus boycott that followed Parks' arrest threatened Montgomery in more ways than one. African-Americans were challenging white dominance, and because they accounted for approximately 75 percent of the city's bus passengers, Montgomery's economy was in danger, too.

Because she lost her job as a seamstress in Montgomery and was unable to find work, Parks left Alabama in 1957 and moved to Detroit, Michigan. She worked for Congressman John Conyers in the First Congressional District of Michigan from 1965 to 1988. In 1987, she cofounded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development (Raymond Parks was Rosa Parks' husband). The institute supports a "Pathways to Freedom" program that helps youth understand the Underground Railroad, the civil rights movement, and other important events, while considering the theme "Where have we been? Where are we going?"

The bus Rosa Parks rode was eventually retired and found its way to a field, where it stayed for 30 years and was used as a place to store lumber and tools. Bus #2857 had long been rumored to be the bus Parks boarded in 1955, but nobody was ever quite sure. Official documentation and newspaper clippings aided in the authentication of the bus. With the help of the nonprofit organization the Henry Ford, a grant from the federal government and MSX International, an automotive engineering and technical services firm, the bus was restored. You can view the bus online in its dilapidated and restored state.

Among the numerous awards Park received were the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal of Honor, some of the highest awards granted in the United States.

Rosa Parks died in 2005 at the age of 92. Even in death she made history when she became the first woman and the second African-American to lie in state in the Rotunda of the United States Capitol. Honoring someone in the Rotunda requires an act of Congress. A Washington Post article describes the tribute to Parks and includes photo galleries depicting her life and experiences.