On February 14th, 1913, Rosa McCauley was born in Tuskegee, Alabama. There is a lack of records of her early life. A photo of her birthplace exists, but only shows a plywood shanty with a broken picket fence. She grew up in a religious family, and was baptized into the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Her faith was important to her, and she attended church every weekend. In later interviews with reporters, she told people she had never been forced to go to church, but thought she needed God and truly believed herself.

She only stayed in Tuskegee for two years and then moved with her grandparents to Pine Level. While she was growing up, the Klu Klux Klan was rampant around her city and region. She said, “ By the time I was six, I was old enough to realize that we were not actually free. The Klu Klux Klan was riding through the black community, burning churches, beating up people, killing people.” Tying back to her faith, she believed God was responsible for keeping her and her family safe through the years.

At this time in history, the Jim Crow laws were still holding blacks back from participating in government and becoming equal, productive citizens in the country. These laws did things such as make blacks stay out of certain stores, use different bathrooms and seats, and of course, they had to sit in the back of the bus. This particular law would effect Rosa in a way she couldn’t have dreamed of. In turn, she would affect and entire nation and change the course of America.

“In Montgomery, Alabama in December of 1955, she refused to give up her seat on a city bus to a white passenger.” The bus driver had her arrested and she was tried for violation of the law. She was convicted and fined, but she would not let it go that easy. Her fellow blacks began to rally around her and the incident sparked a citywide boycott of the bus system by blacks that lasted more than a year.

The boycott made a young clergyman named Martin Luther King, Jr., rise to national prominence. The U.S. Supreme Court eventually made the decision outlawing segregation on city buses, thus destroying the law that had sparked the conflict. The movement would not stop there however. The civil rights protesters took it farther, and demanded fairness in voting procedures, and an end to segregation in schools.

Over the next four decades, she helped make her fellow Americans aware of the history of the civil rights struggle. Her example remains an inspiration to freedom-loving people everywhere. She believed in nonviolence lie her new friend, Dr. King. Together they would set out to change the way society looked at and treated blacks.

Rosa had many interviews and became famous for her actions, or rather, inaction. She never condemned the people that had done this, and always gave the same story and reasons for what she did. In an interview, she said, “People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”

As she grew older , Rosa became less able to be an active member of the NAACP, and faded into the background. But she became a symbolic hope to all that would follow her and even in her late life, was still trying to make a difference. She stayed in Detroit in her last years, and she began to call attention to black youth and the trouble they seemed to get into. After calling attention to this, she herself was robbed in her home by a young Detroit delinquent who beat her up and only got $103 dollars from her. At this same time, however, people around the country were holding fundraisers to help Rosa Parks stay well cared for as she grew in her years.

Rosa Parks lived in Detroit until she passed away at age 92 on October 24, 2005, about 19:00 EDT, in her apartment. City officials in Montgomery and Detroit announced on October 27 that the front seats of their city buses would be reserved with black ribbons in honor of Parks until her funeral. Parks’ coffin was flown to Montgomery and taken in a horse-drawn hearse to the her childhood church, where she lay in the uniform of a church deaconess, on October 29. A memorial service was held there the next morning, and one of the speakers was the current Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice. Condoleezza stated that if it had not been for Rosa Parks, she would not have ever been able to become the Secretary of State. That night, Rosa’s casket was driven to the capital, Washington, D.C. She was then taken aboard a bus similar to the one in which she made her protest, to lie in honor in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda making her the first woman and second African American ever to receive this honor.