Rosa Parks

CTL-E-5346 · Person · activist · 1913–2005

VERIFIED evidence grade of this record

Rosa Parks, born Rosa Louise McCauley on February 4, 1913, in Tuskegee, Alabama, was a civil rights activist whose refusal to surrender her seat on a segregated Montgomery bus became the catalyst of the modern civil rights movement. A seamstress at a Montgomery department store, she was no accidental actor: she had served as secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP from 1943 and worked in voter registration for years before her arrest. On December 1, 1955, she refused a driver's order to give her seat to a white passenger and was arrested and convicted under the city's segregation ordinances. Her arrest sparked the Montgomery bus boycott, begun December 5, 1955, under the Montgomery Improvement Association, which elected the young pastor Martin Luther King Jr. its president; the boycott lasted 381 days and ended in victory after the Supreme Court upheld a ruling that bus segregation was unconstitutional. Parks later moved to Detroit, worked on the staff of Representative John Conyers from 1965 to 1988, and co-founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development in 1987. She died in Detroit on October 24, 2005, aged 92.

The record

• Also known as: Rosa Louise McCauley, Rosa Louise McCauley Parks

Notes

Statistics: boycott lasted 381 days (December 5, 1955 – December 1956), per Britannica and the Congressional Record · Supreme Court upheld the lower-court desegregation ruling in November 1956 (Nov. 13, 1956, per Congress.gov) and the boycott ended December 21, 1956, per Britannica · NAACP Spingarn Medal 1979, Presidential Medal of Freedom 1996, Congressional Gold Medal 1999, per Britannica/Congressional Record · on her death in 2005 she became the first woman and the second Black person to lie in honor in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda, per Britannica · Curator's Judgment: DRAFT — for founder review: People who have passed get their flowers, and Parks's are overdue in their precise form: the graph resists the 'tired seamstress' simplification by recording the organizer — twelve years as NAACP chapter secretary and voter-registration worker before December 1, 1955. Her act was a decision made by a trained activist, and its 381-day consequence was built by a community, with King (CTL-E-0342) elevated by it as much as he led it. · Photo slot: CLEARED CANDIDATE — Wikimedia Commons File:Rosa Parks being fingerprinted by Deputy Sheriff D.H. Lackey after being arrested on February 22, 1956, during the Montgomery bus boycott.jpg, Gene Herrick (Associated Press; Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery), Public domain, license verified from Commons API metadata on 2026-10-15; direct URL https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ea/Rosa_Parks_being_fingerprinted_by_Deputy_Sheriff_D.H._Lackey_after_being_arrested_on_February_22%2C_1956%2C_during_the_Montgomery_bus_boycott.jpg ; not downloaded — visual pass follows merge per standing pattern. Note for the visual pass: this is the February 22, 1956 fingerprinting during the boycott indictments, a documentary photograph — not the December 1, 1955 booking photo; caption must say so.

Relationships

• Martin Luther King Jr. — related to
  Parks's December 1, 1955 arrest and conviction in Montgomery sparked the bus boycott begun December 5, 1955; the boycott's organizing body, the Montgomery Improvement Association, elected Martin Luther King Jr., then the young pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, as its president, and the 381-day boycott ended after the Supreme Court upheld bus desegregation in 1956.

Referenced by

• Claudette Colvin — related to → this record

Sources

• Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Rosa Parks | Biography, Accomplishments, Quotes, Family, & Facts" — https://www.britannica.com/biography/Rosa-Parks (primary source)
• Congressional Record via Congress.gov / Library of Congress, Senate proceedings on Rosa Parks — https://www.congress.gov/congressional-record/volume-151/issue-138/senate-section/article/S11911-1
• CNN, "Rosa Parks Fast Facts" — https://www.cnn.com/2013/07/26/us/rosa-parks-fast-facts?cid=external-feeds_iluminar_meta

Record CTL-E-5346 · CultureTechLens Knowledge Graph · evidence grade: VERIFIED · 3 sources (1 primary) · 2 mapped relationships · CTL research: PPL-001.
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