Her arrest set off a lengthy bus boycott by thousands of blacks — led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., then a local minister. The boycott lasted about a year until the Supreme Court declared Montgomery's bus segregation law unconstitutional. She is considered the mother of the Civil Rights movement in the United States.
She was born Rosa Louise McCauley, on Feb. 4, 1913 in Tuskegee, Alabama. Parks was 42 years old when she refused to give up her seat. She was well respected in the black community for her work with the Montgomery Voters League as well as the secretary of the Montgomery branch of the NAACP. The Voters League was a group that helped black citizens pass the various tests that had been set up to make it difficult for them to register as voters.
She had taken to protesting segregation in her own quiet way — for instance, by walking up the stairs of a building rather than riding in an elevator marked "blacks only." She often avoided traveling by bus, preferring to walk home from work when she was not too tired to do so. She has insisted that her feet were not aching; she was, by her own testimony, no more tired than usual. And she did not plan her fateful act: "I did not get on the bus to get arrested," she has said. "I got on the bus to go home."
"For a little more than a year, we stayed off those busses. We did not return to using public transportation until the Supreme Court said there shouldn't be racial segregation," she said."
Montgomery's segregation laws were complex: blacks were required to pay their fare to the driver, then get off and reboard through the back door. Sometimes the bus would drive off before the paid-up customers made it to the back entrance. If the white section was full and another white customer entered, blacks were required to give up their seats and move farther to the back; a black person was not even allowed to sit across the aisle from whites. These humiliations were compounded by the fact that two-thirds of the bus riders in Montgomery were black.
Her action cost her the seamstress job and prompted harassment and threats to her family. So she moved to Detroit in 1957. She joined the staff of Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., in 1965 and worked there until retiring in 1988. In 1987, she co-founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development, which motivates youth to reach their potential through such programs as bank training, substance-abuse prevention and goal setting. The institute's Pathways to Freedom program enables youth to research history around the country -- by bus -- tracing the underground railroad.