early life.
Rosa Parks was born as Rosa Louise McCauley in Alabama on February 4, 1913, her parents, James McCauley and Leona Edwards worked as a carpenter and a teacher.
She was unusually small as a child and suffered from chronic tonsillitis.
Her parents separated when she was young and so she moved with her mother to a place just outside of Montgomery in Alabama. She was raised on a farm.
Until Rosa was eleven, she was taught at home by her mother but she then started at the industrial school for girls in Montgomery. Later she went to a school set up by the Alabama State Teachers College for Negroes for secondary education; however Rosa had to end her education early when her Grandmother took ill.
In those days, school buses were only available to white children. Rosa parks claims that she would see the school buses pass while she walked in the rain and just see it as a way of life. She saw two worlds, a black one, and a white one.
Rosa married Raymond Parks, in 1932. Raymond was a member of NAACP at the time and was fighting for the civil rights movement. He convinced Rosa to finish off her secondary education and received her diploma in 1933.
The act that started it all.
On 1 December 1955, a 42-year-old seamstress was sitting on a bus when a white man demanded to take her seat. This woman was called Rosa Parks.
"Are you going to stand up?" the bus driver, James Blake, asked her.
"No," she answered, with a perfectly calm voice.
"Well, by God," the driver replied, "I'm going to have you arrested."
"You may do that," Mrs Parks responded, remaining calm.
At that time, the southern states' had rigid segregation laws, which had been in force since the end of the Civil War in 1865, ordered that there must be separation of the races on buses, in restaurants and other public areas.
These rules were unfair and unjust. Rosa Parks was more than willing to stand up for what she believed in, despite how awful the immediate consequences may have...