FROM WIKIPEDIA COMMONS
Rosa Louise McCauley Parks (February 4, 1913 – October 24, 2005) was an American activist in the civil rights movement best known for her pivotal role in the Montgomery bus boycott. The United States Congress has called her “the first lady of civil rights” and “the mother of the freedom movement”.
On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Parks rejected bus driver James F. Blake‘s order to vacate a row of four seats in the “colored” section in favor of a white passenger, once the “white” section was filled. Parks wasn’t the first person to resist bus segregation, but the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) believed that she was the best candidate for seeing through a court challenge after her arrest for civil disobedience in violating Alabama segregation laws, and she helped inspire the black community to boycott the Montgomery buses for over a year. The case became bogged down in the state courts, but the federal Montgomery bus lawsuit Browder v. Gayle resulted in a November 1956 decision that bus segregation is unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Parks’ act of defiance and the Montgomery bus boycott became important symbols of the movement. She became an international icon of resistance to racial segregation, and organized and collaborated with civil rights leaders, including Edgar Nixon and Martin Luther King Jr.. At the time, Parks was employed as a seamstress at a local department store and was secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP. She had recently attended the Highlander Folk School, a Tennessee center for training activists for workers’ rights and racial equality. Although widely honored in later years, she also suffered for her act; she was fired from her job, and received death threats for years afterwards. Shortly after the boycott, she moved to Detroit, where she briefly found similar work. From 1965 to 1988, she served as secretary and receptionist to John Conyers, an African-American US Representative. She was also active in the Black Power movement and the support of political prisoners in the US.
After retirement, Parks wrote her autobiography and continued to insist that there was more work to be done in the struggle for justice. Parks received national recognition, including the NAACP’s 1979 Spingarn Medal, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Congressional Gold Medal, and a posthumous statue in the United States Capitol’s National Statuary Hall. Upon her death in 2005, she was the first woman to lie in honor in the Capitol Rotunda. California and Missouri commemorate Rosa Parks Day on her birthday, February 4, while Ohio and Oregon commemorate the anniversary of her arrest, December 1.
TODAY’S ALMANAC
1820s
1860s
1910s
1930s
1940s
- BORN 1940: MARIO ANDRETTI (RACE CAR DRIVER)
- BORN 1944: KELLY BISHOP (ACTRESS)
- BORN 1948: BERNADETTE PETERS (ACTRESS & SINGER)
1950s
- 1952: VINCENT MASSEY BECAME THE FIRST CANADIAN BORN GOVERNOR GENERAL OF CANADA
- 1953: JAMES D. WATSON AND FRANCIS H. C. CRICK ANNOUNCED DISCOVERY OF DNA’S CHEMICAL STRUCTURE
- BORN 1957: JOHN TURTURRO (ACTOR)
1960s
1970s
1980s
1990s
2000s
- BORN 2001: SMARTY JONES (KENTUCKY DERBY WINNING HORSE)
- DIED 2004: DANIEL BOORSTIN (PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR AND SOCIAL HISTORIAN WHO SERVED AS THE LIBRARIAN OF CONGRESS FOR 12 YEARS)
- DIED 2007: ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER JR. (PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING HISTORIAN)
- DIED 2008: MIKE SMITH (LEAD SINGER OF DAVE CLARK FIVE)
- DIED 2009: PAUL HARVEY (RADIO BROADCASTER)
- 2009: PERFORMER NATASHA VERUSCHKA SWALLOWED 22.83-INCH SWORD
2010s
COURTESY www.almanac.com
