Rosa Parks, one of the speakers at a rally near the Washington Monument, Washington on June 19, 1968 held as part of the Poor People's Campaign.
Rosa Louise McCauley Parks (February 4, 1913 – October 24, 2005) was an activist in the civil rights movement best known for her pivotal role in the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The United States Congress has called her "the first lady of civil rights" and "the mother of the freedom movement". On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Parks refused to obey bus driver James F. Blake's order to give up her seat in the "colored section" to a white passenger, after the whites-only section was filled. Parks was not the first person to resist bus segregation, but the NAACP believed that she was the best candidate for seeing through a court challenge after her arrest for civil disobedience in violating Alabama segregation laws. Parks' prominence in the community and her willingness to become a controversial figure inspired the black community to boycott the Montgomery buses for over a year, the first major direct action campaign of the post-war civil rights movement. Her case became bogged down in the state courts, but the federal Montgomery bus lawsuit Browder v. Gayle succeeded in November 1956.[2][3] Parks' act of defiance and the Montgomery bus boycott became important symbols of the movement. She became an international icon of resistance to racial segregation. She organized and collaborated with civil rights leaders, including Edgar Nixon, president of the local chapter of the NAACP; and Martin Luther King, Jr., a new minister in Montgomery who gained national prominence in the civil rights movement. At the time, Parks was secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP. She had recently attended the Highlander Folk School, a Tennessee center for training activists for workers' rights and racial equality. She acted as a private citizen "tired of giving in". Although widely honored in later years, she also suffered for her act; she was fired from her job as a seamstress in a local department store, and received death threats for years afterwards.
Size: 3320px × 4988px
Location: Washington , DC, USA
Photo credit: © American Photo Archive / Alamy / Afripics
License: Royalty Free
Model Released: No
Keywords: 1965, african, alabama, american, assasinate, assasinated, black, boycott, bus, civil, deep, demonstrate, demonstration, dream, earl, freedom, integration, james, jr, king, luther, man, march, martin, minister, minority, ml, mlk, montgomery, naacp, negro, nonviolence, nonviolent, parks, pastor, people, peoples, poor, ray, religion, religious, rights, rosa, segregatiom, sixties, south, southern, soutn, washington, woman
