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Rosa Parks will always be remembered for refusing to give up her seat to a white man on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Ala. But the former seamstress was far more complex than she’s been depicted as in history texts. Brooklyn College Professor Jeanne Theoharis’ book, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, reveals that she was “high strung” with politically radical views. The following facts about Parks’ life demonstrate that the civil rights icon was a woman fed up with injustice and unwilling to be pushed around.
Evidently a militant streak coursed through Parks’ veins. Born Rosa Louise McCauley on Feb. 4, 1913, in Tuskegee, Ala., Parks was raised by her grandmother and grandfather, a follower of back-to-Africa proponent Marcus Garvey. Parks would sit on the porch of her grandfather’s home in Pine Level, Ala., as he held a shotgun to fend off any Klansmen who dared threaten his family.
Parks’ grandparents were former slaves. According to Theoharis, “Rosa’s family sought to teach her a controlled anger, a survival strategy that balanced compliance with militancy.”
As a child, Parks threatened a white man with a brick after he insulted her. Growing up in Pine Level, Parks and other black children were forced to walk to school while the city provided bus transportation for white students. Parks dropped out of school because her mother and grandmother both suffered from poor health. After her marriage to husband Raymond Parks, a barber and NAACP activist, at age 19 in 1932, she earned her high school diploma.
As a young woman working as a maid, Parks reportedly fended off a white man who tried to rape her. “How I hated all white people, especially him,” she said of the man she called Mr. Charlie. “I said I would never stoop so low as to have anything to do with him. ...if he wanted to kill me and rape a dead body, he was welcome but he would have to kill me first.”
Parks spent her young adulthood involved in the burgeoning civil rights movement. Before her famous stand on the bus, Parks served as secretary for the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP.
Parks was not the first black in Montgomery to protest the segregated bus system. Two other black women refused to relinquish their seats to whites before Parks did on Dec. 1, 1955. Civil rights groups reportedly didn’t rally behind these women because they didn’t think they represented blacks well enough. One of the women in question was an unwed teen. The married and educated Parks was the type of woman civil rights groups figured could inspire blacks in Montgomery to boycott Jim Crow. Parks, however, is said to have advocated for those who stood up to segregation on city buses before she did and urged others to challenge segregation on local transit.
It was no accident when Parks defied a bus driver’s orders to relinquish her seat to a white man, which Jim Crow dictated blacks had to do when seating for whites ran out. The longtime activist recalled in retrospect, “I had felt for a long time, that if I was ever told to get up so a white person could sit, that I would refuse to do so.”
Her act of civil disobedience ushered in the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which lasted for 381 days. While the boycott proved successful, Parks and her husband were forced to relocate North to Detroit because her political activism made it difficult for the couple to obtain work.
Once in Michigan, Parks worked for Congressman John Conyers and served on the board of Planned Parenthood.
Parks died on Oct. 24, 2005, nearly 50 years after the Montgomery Bus Boycott began.
On Feb. 4, 2013, the U.S. Postal Service unveiled its Rosa Parks Forever Stamp in recognition of her 100th birthday.
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