| Rosa Parks Born in 1913 in Tuskegee, Alabama, Rosa Parks was in her 40s when she took the action that led to her being called "the mother of the civil rights movement." She decided she would no longer get up to relinquish her seat on a Montgomery bus to a white man. A seamstress at a Montgomery department store, she was very active at that time in the local NAACP and, with her husband, had taken part in voter registration drives. She had spent part of the summer of 1955 at an interracial workshop at the Highlander Center in Tennessee, where she later said she "gained strength to persevere in my work for freedom, but just for blacks but for all oppressed people." Rosa Parks, who lived in Detroit in her later years, received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1996. After she died in October 2005, she was the first woman in US history to lie in state at the Capitol in Washington DC. >> Learn more: http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/par0bio-1 |