Rosa Louise McCauley Parks February 4, β October 24, was an American activist in the civil rights movement , best known for her pivotal role in the Montgomery bus boycott. The United States Congress has honored her as "the first lady of civil rights" and "the mother of the freedom movement". Parks became an NAACP activist in , participating in several high-profile civil rights campaigns. Blake 's order to vacate a row of four seats in the " colored " section in favor of a white female passenger who had complained to the driver, once the "white" section was filled.
The case became bogged down in the state courts, but the federal Montgomery bus lawsuit Browder v. Gayle resulted in a November decision that bus segregation is unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to the U. Parks's act of defiance and the Montgomery bus boycott became important symbols of the movement.
She became an international icon of resistance to racial segregation , and organized and collaborated with civil rights leaders, including Edgar Nixon and Martin Luther King Jr. She had recently attended the Highlander Folk School , a Tennessee center for training activists for workers' rights and racial equality. Although widely honored in later years, she also suffered for her act; she was fired from her job and received death threats for years afterwards.
She was also active in the black power movement and the support of political prisoners in the US. After retirement, Parks wrote her autobiography and continued to insist that there was more work to be done in the struggle for justice.
Upon her death in , she was the first woman to lie in honor in the Capitol Rotunda. In addition to African ancestry, one of Parks's great-grandfathers was Scots-Irish , and one of her great-grandmothers was a partβ Native American slave. McCauley attended rural schools [ 17 ] until the age of eleven. Before that, her mother taught her "a good deal about sewing.
