Born in Tuskegee, Alabama, on February 4, 1913, Rosa Lee Parks attended Alabama State Teachers College (now Alabama State University) for a time. She later moved to Montgomery, Alabama. She lived in quiet obscurity for the first 42 years of her life. In 1943 she became a member of the Montgomery chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and served as its secretary until 1956. On December 1, 1955, while returning home from her job as a seamstress, she was ordered by the driver of the city bus on which she was riding to give up her seat to a white man. She refused. She was then arrested and fined ten dollars for her failure to comply with the city╒s racial segregation ordinances. The episode galvanized African-American community leaders in Montgomery into action. Under the aegis of the Montgomery Improvement Association, and led by the young pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a boycott of the municipal bus company was begun on December 5. The boycott lasted for 382 days before the city government bowed to public opinion aroused throughout the nation in support of the protest. City buses were thereafter run on an unsegregated basis. For her role in sparking the successful campaign, which thrust Dr. King into the leadership of a still-fledgling movement, Parks became known as the ╥mother of the civil rights movement.╙ In 1957 she and her family moved to Detroit, where she was employed on the staff of U.S. Rep. John Conyers from 1965 until her retirement in 1988. In her honor the Southern Christian Leadership Council established the annual Rosa Parks Freedom Award. She was awarded the Spingarn Medal in 1979, was the first woman to receive the Martin Luther King, Jr. Nonviolent Peace Prize in 1980, and in 1990 received the Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Legislative Achievement Award. In 1987 she established the Parks Institute for Self-Development in Detroit to provide career training for young people. She published her autobiography, Rosa Parks: My Story, with Jim Haskins, in 1992.
