Rosa Parks

Rosa Parks was an American civil rights activist whose refusal to give up her seat on a public bus precipitated the 1955–56 Montgomery bus boycott in Alabama, which became the spark that ignited the civil rights movement in the United States. She is known as the “mother of the civil rights movement.”

When Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, city bus for white passengers in 1955, she was arrested for violating the city’s racial segregation ordinances. Her action sparked the Montgomery bus boycott, led by the Montgomery Improvement Association and Martin Luther King, Jr., that eventually succeeded in achieving desegregation of the city buses. The boycott also helped give rise to the American civil rights movement.

Rosa Parks was not the first Black woman to refuse to give up her seat on a segregated bus, though her story attracted the most attention nationwide. Nine months before Parks, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin had refused to give up her bus seat, as had dozens of other Black women throughout the history of segregated public transit.

In 1992 Rosa Parks published Rosa Parks: My Story, an autobiography written with Jim Haskins that described her role in the American civil rights movement, beyond her refusal to give up her seat on a segregated public bus to white passengers.