Rosa Parks famously refused to give up her seat on the bus, in order to accommodate white passengers. Where did she grow up?
Rosa Parks was born in Tuskegee, Alabama, USA. She moved to Pine Level, Alabama when she was 2 years old, which is where she spent most of her childhood.
Read on to learn more about the life of Rosa Parks, who is accredited with significantly advancing the civil rights movement.
The Early Years of Rosa Parks
Rosa Parks, whose birth name was Rosa Louise McCauley, was born in Tuskegee, Alabama, on February 4, 1913. Rosa Parks’ parents were both African-American.
Her parents separated when she was a baby and she moved to live in Pine Level with her mother’s parents. She grew up here on a farm along with her younger brother, Sylvester.
Rosa attended school until she was 11 years old. She dropped out in order to care for her grandmother and then mother, who became ill.
Remembering the journey to school, she recalled how there were school buses that took the white children to their school, but no buses provided for black children.
She remarked, “I’d see the bus pass every day. But to me, that was a way of life; we had no choice but to accept what was the custom. The bus was among the first ways I realized there was a black world and a white world.”
At the time that Rosa Parks was born, rights for African-American citizens of the US were hardly protected at all. Jim Crow laws, which pursued the complete segregation of white and “colored” individuals, had been enacted in the South since the late 19th century.
The public support of these laws meant that most Southern establishments adhered to the policies of segregation. Businesses could opt not to serve non-white citizens at all, or if they did, customer areas would be segregated.
Busses and trains (among other public facilities) would usually have “white” and “colored” areas that were labeled accordingly.
Rosa Parks witnessed many incidents of racism in her life before her fateful protest on the bus.
She recalled the feeling of injustice she experienced as a child, saying: “As far back as I remember, I could never think in terms of accepting physical abuse without some form of retaliation if possible.”
On the Bus
In 1955, Rosa Parks boarded a bus and sat down in the furthest back row of the colored section. As the bus traveled along its route, the white-only section filled and several white passengers were left standing.
The bus driver ordered the black passengers in the first row of the black section to stand so that he could move the “colored” section sign back. The other three black passengers obliged with the demand, but Rosa Parks refused.
Recalling her mentality at the moment, she remarked, “I felt a determination cover my body like a quilt on a winter night.”
After some confrontation with the driver, he remarked, “If you don’t stand up, I’m going to have to call the police and have you arrested.” To this, Parks replied, “You may do that.”
Discussing her motivation to subvert the discriminatory policy, 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.”
Bus Boycott
After her arrest, a boycott of the local public buses was carried out by members of the African-American population. The boycott continued for 381 days, causing great damage to the bus company’s finances.
Eventually, the segregation law on public transport in the US was deemed unconstitutional and abandoned.
Rosa Parks’ efforts, among those of other activists, catalyzed the civil rights movement in the late 1950s.
Watch an interview from 1995, where she discusses the incident below.