5 paragraph essay about rosa parks

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Who was Rosa Parks?

Why is rosa parks important, was rosa parks the first black woman to refuse to give up her seat on a segregated bus.

• When did the American civil rights movement start?

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• Blackpast.org - Biography of Rosa Parks
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• The Henry Ford - Rosa Parks: What if I Don’t Move to the Back of the Bus?
• National Women's History Museum - Rosa Parks
• Encyclopedia of Alabama - Rosa Parks
• The Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute - Rosa Parks
• Spartacus Educational - Biography of Rosa Parks
• Bill of Rights Institute - Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Montgomery Bus Boycott
• Iowa State University - Archives of Women's Political Communication - Rosa Parks
• National Archives - An Act of Courage, The Arrest Records of Rosa Parks
• Academy of Achievement - Rosa Parks
• Rosa Parks - Children's Encyclopedia (Ages 8-11)
• Rosa Parks - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)

Rosa Parks was an American civil rights activist whose refusal to give up her seat on a public bus precipitated the 1955–56 Montgomery bus boycott in Alabama, which became the spark that ignited the civil rights movement in the United States . She is known as the “mother of the civil rights movement.”

When Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, city bus for white passengers in 1955, she was arrested for violating the city’s racial segregation ordinances. Her action sparked the Montgomery bus boycott , led by the Montgomery Improvement Association and Martin Luther King, Jr. , that eventually succeeded in achieving desegregation of the city buses. The boycott also helped give rise to the American civil rights movement .

Rosa Parks was not the first Black woman to refuse to give up her seat on a segregated bus, though her story attracted the most attention nationwide. Nine months before Parks, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin had refused to give up her bus seat, as had dozens of other Black women throughout the history of segregated public transit.

What did Rosa Parks write?

In 1992 Rosa Parks published Rosa Parks: My Story , an autobiography written with Jim Haskins that described her role in the American civil rights movement , beyond her refusal to give up her seat on a segregated public bus to white passengers.

Recent News

Rosa Parks (born February 4, 1913, Tuskegee , Alabama , U.S.—died October 24, 2005, Detroit , Michigan) was an American civil rights activist whose refusal to relinquish her seat on a public bus precipitated the 1955–56 Montgomery bus boycott in Alabama, which became the spark that ignited the civil rights movement in the United States .

Born to parents James McCauley, a skilled stonemason and carpenter, and Leona Edwards McCauley, a teacher, in Tuskegee, Alabama, Rosa Louise McCauley spent much of her childhood and youth ill with chronic tonsillitis . When she was two years old, shortly after the birth of her younger brother, Sylvester, her parents chose to separate. Estranged from their father from then on, the children moved with their mother to live on their maternal grandparents’ farm in Pine Level, Alabama, outside Montgomery. The children’s great-grandfather, a former indentured servant , also lived there; he died when Rosa was six.

For much of her childhood, Rosa was educated at home by her mother, who also worked as a teacher at a nearby school. Rosa helped with chores on the farm and learned to cook and sew. Farm life, though, was less than idyllic . The Ku Klux Klan was a constant threat, as she later recalled, “ burning Negro churches, schools, flogging and killing ” Black families. Rosa’s grandfather would often keep watch at night, rifle in hand, awaiting a mob of violent white men. The house’s windows and doors were boarded shut with the family, frequently joined by Rosa’s widowed aunt and her five children, inside. On nights thought to be especially dangerous, the children would have to go to bed with their clothes on so that they would be ready if the family needed to escape. Sometimes Rosa would choose to stay awake and keep watch with her grandfather.

Rosa and her family experienced racism in less violent ways, too. When Rosa entered school in Pine Level, she had to attend a segregated establishment where one teacher was put in charge of about 50 or 60 schoolchildren. Though white children in the area were bused to their schools, Black children had to walk. Public transportation, drinking fountains, restaurants, and schools were all segregated under Jim Crow laws . At age 11 Rosa entered the Montgomery Industrial School for Girls, where Black girls were taught regular school subjects alongside domestic skills. She went on to attend a Black junior high school for 9th grade and a Black teacher’s college for 10th and part of 11th grade. At age 16, however, she was forced to leave school because of an illness in the family, and she began cleaning the houses of white people.

In 1932, at age 19, Rosa married Raymond Parks, a barber and a civil rights activist, who encouraged her to return to high school and earn a diploma. She later made a living as a seamstress. In 1943 Rosa Parks became a member of the Montgomery chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and she served as its secretary until 1956.

On December 1, 1955, Parks was riding a crowded Montgomery city bus when the driver, upon noticing that there were white passengers standing in the aisle, asked Parks and other Black passengers to surrender their seats and stand. Three of the passengers left their seats, but Parks refused. She was subsequently arrested and fined $10 for the offense and $4 for court costs, neither of which she paid. Instead, she accepted Montgomery NAACP chapter president E.D. Nixon’s offer to help her appeal the conviction and thus challenge legal segregation in Alabama. Both Parks and Nixon knew that they were opening themselves to harassment and death threats, but they also knew that the case had the potential to spark national outrage. Under the aegis of the Montgomery Improvement Association —led by the young pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Martin Luther King, Jr. —a boycott of the municipal bus company began on December 5. African Americans constituted some 70 percent of the ridership, and the absence of their bus fares cut deeply into revenue. The boycott lasted 381 days, and even people outside Montgomery embraced the cause: protests of segregated restaurants, pools, and other public facilities took place all over the United States. On November 13, 1956, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s decision declaring Montgomery’s segregated bus seating unconstitutional, and a court order to integrate the buses was served on December 20; the boycott ended the following day. For her role in igniting the successful campaign, Parks became known as the “mother of the civil rights movement.”

Simplifications of Parks’s story claimed that she had refused to give up her bus seat because she was tired rather than because she was protesting unfair treatment. But she was an accomplished activist by the time of her arrest, having worked with the NAACP on other civil rights cases, such as that of the Scottsboro Boys , nine Black youths falsely accused of sexually assaulting two white women. According to Parks’s autobiography, “I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was 42. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.” Parks was not the first Black woman to refuse to give up her bus seat for a white person—15-year-old Claudette Colvin had been arrested for the same offense nine months earlier, and dozens of other Black women had preceded them in the history of segregated public transit . However, as secretary of the local NAACP, and with the Montgomery Improvement Association behind her, Parks had access to resources and publicity that those other women had not had. It was her case that forced the city of Montgomery to desegregate city buses permanently.

In 1957 Parks moved with her husband and mother to Detroit, where from 1965 to 1988 she worked on the staff of Michigan Congressman John Conyers, Jr. She remained active in the NAACP, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference established an annual Rosa Parks Freedom Award in her honor. In 1987 she cofounded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development to provide career training for young people and offer teenagers the opportunity to learn about the history of the civil rights movement. She received numerous awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1996) and the Congressional Gold Medal (1999). Her autobiography, Rosa Parks: My Story (1992), was written with Jim Haskins.

Though achieving the desegregation of Montgomery’s city buses was an incredible feat, Parks was not satisfied with that victory. She saw that the United States was still failing to respect and protect the lives of Black Americans. Martin Luther King, Jr., who had been brought to national attention by his organization of the Montgomery bus boycott , was assassinated less than a decade after Parks’s case was won. Biographer Kathleen Tracy noted that Parks, in one of her last interviews, would not quite say that she was happy: “I do the very best I can to look upon life with optimism and hope and looking forward to a better day, but I don’t think there is any such thing as complete happiness. It pains me that there is still a lot of Klan activity and racism. I think when you say you’re happy, you have everything that you need and everything that you want, and nothing more to wish for. I haven’t reached that stage yet.”

After Parks died in 2005, her body lay in state in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol , an honor reserved for private citizens who performed a great service for their country. For two days mourners visited her casket and gave thanks for her dedication to civil rights. Parks was the first woman and only the second Black person to receive the distinction.

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Collection Rosa Parks Papers

"beyond the bus: rosa parks’ lifelong struggle for justice".

Biographer Jeanne Theoharis, professor of political science at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, describes in this article written for the Library of Congress Magazine, vol. 4 no. 2 (March-April 2015):16-18, the recently acquired Rosa Parks Papers and how they shed new light on Parks and her activism.

In September 2014, the Library of Congress received a remarkable 10-year loan of the Rosa Parks Collection. Businessman and philanthropist Howard Buffett had purchased the collection, which had languished in an auction house warehouse for years, to ensure the public would benefit from the historical record of Parks’ life.

These newly-acquired papers and photographs offer a rare look into the ideas and activities of a woman who changed the nation—not just on a single day on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus (see page 20) but over the course of her life. The material offers an unprecedented look at Parks’ speeches, private thoughts and political insights, revealing what it took to be a lifelong fighter for justice. It takes us behind the scenes in the Montgomery bus boycott and her role in it. It demonstrates how broad her political life was after leaving Montgomery for Detroit in 1957. More poignantly, it shows the decade-long toll that her stand against segregation took on her and her family.

Born in Alabama on Feb. 4, 1913, Rosa Louise McCauley had a determined spirit that was nurtured by her mother and grandparents. She chafed under the strictures of segregation. In 1931, she met Raymond Parks, a politically active barber, and they married in 1932. She joined him in organizing in defense of the nine Scottsboro boys, falsely accused of rape.

Her early writings reveal her “determination never to accept it, even if it must be endured,” which led her to “search for a way of working for freedom and first class citizenship.” In 1943, she became secretary of the Montgomery branch of the NAACP and continued that work for the next decade. The branch, under the leadership of Parks and E.D. Nixon, focused on voter registration, youth outreach, pursuing legal remedies for black victims of white brutality and sexual violence and defending the wrongly accused. After years of such efforts, she grew increasingly discouraged by the lack of change. In August 1955, she journeyed to the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, an interracial organizer-training school, for a two-week workshop on school desegregation. The workshop buoyed her spirit.

Parks’ writings reveal that she was well aware that her refusal to give up her bus seat to a white passenger meant she might “be manhandled but I was willing to take the chance ... I suppose when you live this experience ... getting arrested doesn’t seem so bad.” When her arrest on December 1, 1955, sparked a community bus boycott, Parks labored hard to maintain the protest. Part of how the boycott was sustained for more than a year was through an elaborate, labor-intensive car-pool system. For one month, Parks served as a dispatcher, working to sustain the protest and exhorting riders and drivers to keep going. In her detailed instructions to carpool riders and drivers, she wrote, “Remember how long some of us had to wait when the buses passed us without stopping in the morning and evening.”

Fired from her job at Montgomery Fair department store a month into the boycott, Parks spent most of 1956 traveling throughout the country, raising awareness and funds for the movement. Letters home during her travels describe how heady and tiring this work was—meeting Thurgood Marshall, visiting the Statue of Liberty, doing radio interviews and giving numerous speeches.

Her efforts, alongside others in Montgomery, helped turn a local struggle into a national movement. “Our non-violent protest has proven to all that no intelligent right thinking person is satisfied with less than human rights that are enjoyed by all people.” In her notes for a Nov. 12, 1956, speech about the bus boycott at a local NAACP chapter, she celebrated the Supreme Court’s decision against bus segregation, but saw much work ahead.

Bus desegregation did not alleviate the suffering of the Parks family. Working class and living in the Cleveland Courts Projects, the Parks family had encountered periods of economic trouble before, but the toll that Parks’ arrest took on her family was enormous and far-reaching. Her bus protest plunged her family into a decade of health and economic instability, which is reflected in their 1955-1965 tax returns.

Both Rosa and Raymond lost their jobs early on in the boycott, developed health problems and never found steady work in Montgomery again. In the summer of 1957, they were forced to move to Detroit, to join her brother and extended family. For a time she worked as a hostess at the inn at Virginia’s Hampton Institute. But an ulcer and unhappiness about being away from her family made her leave the position and return to Detroit in late 1958. In 1959, they moved into the Progressive Civic League to serve as the building’s caretakers but had difficulty making the rent or even affording a refrigerator. Her health worsened, landing her in the hospital. She would not work steadily again until 1965.

But Parks’ political efforts continued. She protested housing segregation, participated in Detroit’s Great March for Freedom and attended the March on Washington in August 1963. The following year, Parks volunteered on John Conyers’ first congressional campaign for Michigan’s newly redrawn first district, on a platform of “Jobs, Justice, Peace.” After he was elected to Congress, Conyers hired her to work in his Detroit office, where she remained until her retirement in 1988.

Like Montgomery, Detroit was plagued with racial and social inequity. Her work with constituents in Rep. Conyers’ office, along with her own experiences in the city, made her keenly aware of the issues—from poverty and job discrimination to lack of access to health care and housing segregation to school inequality and police brutality.

Rosa Parks’ political activities in Detroit were even more diverse than they had been in Montgomery. She worked on prisoner support, helped run the Detroit chapter of the Friends of SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) and took part in the growing movement against U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Attending scores of events and meetings across the city, she traveled regularly to take part in the growing Black Power movement across the country. When asked by a reporter from Sepia magazine in 1974 how she managed to do so much, she demurred, “I do what I can.”

In 1987, she and long-time friend Elaine Steele started the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development, which continues today to educate youth about the struggle for civil and human rights.

On a drugstore bag found in her collection, an elderly Rosa Parks doodled over and over, “The Struggle Continues.” Hers lasted a lifetime, as her collection at the Library of Congress reveals.

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By: History.com Editors

Updated: February 20, 2024 | Original: November 9, 2009

Rosa Parks (1913—2005) helped initiate the civil rights movement in the United States when she refused to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery, Alabama bus in 1955. Her actions inspired the leaders of the local Black community to organize the Montgomery Bus Boycott . Led by a young Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. , the boycott lasted more than a year—during which Parks not coincidentally lost her job—and ended only when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that bus segregation was unconstitutional. Over the next half-century, Parks became a nationally recognized symbol of dignity and strength in the struggle to end entrenched racial segregation .

Rosa Parks’ Early Life

Rosa Louise McCauley was born in Tuskegee, Alabama , on February 4, 1913. She moved with her parents, James and Leona McCauley, to Pine Level, Alabama, at age 2 to reside with Leona’s parents. Her brother, Sylvester, was born in 1915, and shortly after that her parents separated.

Did you know? When Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat in 1955, it wasn’t the first time she’d clashed with driver James Blake. Parks stepped onto his very crowded bus on a chilly day 12 years earlier, paid her fare at the front, then resisted the rule in place for Black people to disembark and re-enter through the back door. She stood her ground until Blake pulled her coat sleeve, enraged, to demand her cooperation. Parks left the bus rather than give in.

Rosa’s mother was a teacher, and the family valued education. Rosa moved to Montgomery, Alabama, at age 11 and eventually attended high school there, a laboratory school at the Alabama State Teachers’ College for Negroes. She left at 16, early in 11th grade, because she needed to care for her dying grandmother and, shortly thereafter, her chronically ill mother. In 1932, at 19, she married Raymond Parks, a self-educated man 10 years her senior who worked as a barber and was a long-time member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ( NAACP ). He supported Rosa in her efforts to earn her high-school diploma, which she ultimately did the following year.

Rosa Parks: Roots of Activism

Raymond and Rosa, who worked as a seamstress, became respected members of Montgomery’s large African American community. Co-existing with white people in a city governed by “ Jim Crow ” (segregation) laws, however, was fraught with daily frustrations: Black people could attend only certain (inferior) schools, could drink only from specified water fountains and could borrow books only from the “Black” library, among other restrictions.

Although Raymond had previously discouraged her out of fear for her safety, in December 1943, Rosa also joined the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP and became chapter secretary . She worked closely with chapter president Edgar Daniel (E.D.) Nixon. Nixon was a railroad porter known in the city as an advocate for Black people who wanted to register to vote, and also as president of the local branch of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters union .

Before the Bus, Rosa Parks Was a Sexual Assault Investigator

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10 Things You May Not Know About Rosa Parks

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Montgomery Bus Boycott

For 382 days, almost the entire African American population of Montgomery, Alabama, including leaders Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks, refused to ride on segregated buses. The protests marked a turning point in the American civil rights movement.

December 1, 1955: Rosa Parks Is Arrested

On Thursday, December 1, 1955, the 42-year-old Rosa Parks was commuting home from a long day of work at the Montgomery Fair department store by bus. Black residents of Montgomery often avoided municipal buses if possible because they found the Negroes-in-back policy so demeaning. Nonetheless, 70 percent or more riders on a typical day were Black, and on this day Rosa Parks was one of them.

Segregation was written into law; the front of a Montgomery bus was reserved for white citizens, and the seats behind them for Black citizens. However, it was only by custom that bus drivers had the authority to ask a Black person to give up a seat for a white rider. There were contradictory Montgomery laws on the books: One said segregation must be enforced, but another, largely ignored, said no person (white or Black) could be asked to give up a seat even if there were no other seat on the bus available.

Nonetheless, at one point on the route, a white man had no seat because all the seats in the designated “white” section were taken. So the driver told the riders in the four seats of the first row of the “colored” section to stand, in effect adding another row to the “white” section. The three others obeyed. Parks did not.

“People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired,” wrote Parks in her autobiography, “but that isn’t true. I was not tired physically… No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”

Eventually, two police officers approached the stopped bus, assessed the situation and placed Parks in custody.

Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott

Although Parks used her one phone call to contact her husband, word of her arrest had spread quickly and E.D. Nixon was there when Parks was released on bail later that evening. Nixon had hoped for years to find a courageous Black person of unquestioned honesty and integrity to become the plaintiff in a case that might become the test of the validity of segregation laws. Sitting in Parks’ home, Nixon convinced Parks—and her husband and mother—that Parks was that plaintiff. Another idea arose as well: The Black population of Montgomery would boycott the buses on the day of Parks’ trial, Monday, December 5. By midnight, 35,000 flyers were being mimeographed to be sent home with Black schoolchildren, informing their parents of the planned boycott.

On December 5, Parks was found guilty of violating segregation laws, given a suspended sentence and fined $10 plus $4 in court costs. Meanwhile, Black participation in the boycott was much larger than even optimists in the community had anticipated. Nixon and some ministers decided to take advantage of the momentum, forming the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) to manage the boycott, and they elected Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.–new to Montgomery and just 26 years old—as the MIA’s president.

As appeals and related lawsuits wended their way through the courts, all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court , the Montgomery Bus Boycott engendered anger in much of Montgomery’s white population as well as some violence, and Nixon’s and Dr. King’s homes were bombed . The violence didn’t deter the boycotters or their leaders, however, and the drama in Montgomery continued to gain attention from the national and international press.

On November 13, 1956, the Supreme Court ruled that bus segregation was unconstitutional; the boycott ended December 20, a day after the Court’s written order arrived in Montgomery. Parks—who had lost her job and experienced harassment all year—became known as “the mother of the civil rights movement.”

Rosa Parks's Life After the Boycott

Facing continued harassment and threats in the wake of the boycott, Parks, along with her husband and mother, eventually decided to move to Detroit, where Parks’ brother resided. Parks became an administrative aide in the Detroit office of Congressman John Conyers Jr. in 1965, a post she held until her 1988 retirement. Her husband, brother and mother all died of cancer between 1977 and 1979. In 1987, she co-founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development, to serve Detroit’s youth.

In the years following her retirement, she traveled to lend her support to civil-rights events and causes and wrote an autobiography, Rosa Parks: My Story . In 1999, Parks was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest honor the United States bestows on a civilian. (Other recipients have included George Washington , Thomas Edison , Betty Ford and Mother Teresa.) When she died at age 92 on October 24, 2005, she became the first woman in the nation’s history to lie in honor at the U.S. Capitol.

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Essay Samples on Rosa Parks

Rosa parks and the civil rights movement: a catalyst for change.

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Life, Death and Accomplishments of Rosa Parks

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Best topics on Rosa Parks

1. Rosa Parks and the Civil Rights Movement: a Catalyst for Change

2. Rosa Parks and National Association for the Advancement of the Colored People

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8. How Did Rosa Parks Became the Mother of the Civil Rights Movement

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Rosa Parks and Act of Civil Rights Defiance Essay

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The topic of civil rights in the United States is extensive, with many events contributing to the advancement of liberties for all citizens. Rosa Parks together with Martin Luther King are the two commonly known civil rights advocates. However, most citizens in the United States do not know enough about Park’s life and the protests she contributed to as part of her civil rights advocacy. This paper will summarize articles by Huso, NewsMakers , and Theoharis to discuss the details of Park’s legacy.

Parks is a famous figure in the history of this country and specifically in the context of Civil Rights. Huso describes her primary contribution as “sitting down to take a stand” (82). The activist refused to walk out of a bus when asked to give up her seat for a white person. While in modern-day America, the context of events may be challenging to understand, at that time, racial segregation was a legal norm. However, many citizens, including Parks, protested against the unfair treatment for years.

The famous events happened in Montgomery, a city in Alabama. At that time, Parks was 42 years old, taking a seat in the black section of local public transport (Huso 82). A common perception of these events is that Parks was exhausted after a long day of working, but Huso argues that her actions were a result of a growing civil rights movement (82). Hence, Parks’ actions were not an example of spontaneous defiance but instead a well-planned effort to oppose the segregation policy. A bus with white and black sections was just one example of how the country treated its citizens from a legal viewpoint.

The bus boycott contributed significantly to the civil rights movement in the United States. The initiator, Parks, was arrested and fined a sum of $14 after these events (“Rosa Parks”). This did not stop Parks from engaging in civil rights advocacy in the future. Moreover, with this protest, Parks risked being abused physically, apart from facing legal consequences, due to the social tensions in Montgomery (Huso 82; “Rosa Parks”). These details point to the idea that Park’s actions were more than a protest of a woman tired after a long day at work—it was her statement against segregation and racism.

Although Parks’ most recognized contribution is the bus protest, she has been a civil rights advocate for years and has contributed to the movement in other ways as well. According to Theoharis, the conversations about Rosa Parks and her achievements often avoid the “uncomfortable truths” that do not allow one to understand racism in America completely. For example, the famous mug shot that American students see in their history textbooks was not taken after her most famous action—refusal to leave a bus. In fact, this photo was taken at the sheriff’s office a year later, after Parks and 88 other individuals were arrested for protesting in 1956 (Theoharis).

Parks was arrested a year after for a protest, yet the majority of the American citizens know only a part of her contribution to the civil rights movement and misinterpret the famous image. Therefore, much clarification is needed to ensure that race and the history of civil rights are interpreted correctly.

The issue with misinterpreting Park’s contribution is that her work towards the advancement of Civil Rights is seen as merely one action—the bus boycott. Parks is viewed by many Americans as a typical middle-class woman of her time (Huso, 82; Theoharis). However, Parks has engaged in protests years before this event. Theoharis cites one of her interviews where Parks notes: “over the years, I have been rebelling against second-class citizenship. It didn’t begin when I was arrested.” She continued to protest years after the bus boycott as well.

Among Parks’ contributions to the advancement of civil rights, there are multiple legal disputes. For example, she and her husband were engaged in protecting the “Scottsboro Boys,” who were nine black men accused of raping white women. These accusations were false, yet the prosecution was determined to sentence the men. Moreover, she helped other falsely accused black men and women whose words were not taken seriously by the police (Theoharis). Therefore, it is vital to recognize the contribution of Rosa Parks to the advancement of civil rights in the country fully, including the advocacy and the protests she initiated or helped plan. Her actions were not an act of defiance but a part of Park’s lifelong protest.

In conclusion, this paper is a summary of articles by Huso, NewsMakers, and Theoharis. These texts explore the contribution of Rosa Parks to the advancement of equal rights. Although all authors acknowledge her well-renounced bus boycott, they also cite other actions of Parks as necessary for civil rights. Hence, the bus boycott was not Parks’ defiance but instead was a part of her long battle against segregation. She helped organize the protection of falsely accused black men and aided black women who were not trusted by the police. Moreover, Parks was arrested a year after the bus boycott for participating in a protest with 88 other individuals.

Works Cited

Huso, Deborah. “Sitting Down to Take a Stand: Rosa Parks’ Actions Advanced the Fight for Civil Rights.” Gale In Context: Biography, 2011. Web.

“Rosa Parks.” Gale In Context: Biography , 2007. Web.

Theoharis, Jeanne. “Rosa Parks’s Real Story.” New York Times , 2021. Web.

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• Maria Rosa Henson, Ferdinand Marcos and Imelda Marcos: Three Prominent Filipinos
• Four Events in Women’s History From 1877 to the Present
• Louis Armstrong as Civil Right Activist
• “The Souls of Black Folk” and the Civil Rights Movement
• The Souls of Black Folk: Problems and Solutions
• Law History From Jim Crow to Civil Rights Movement
• Martin Luther King vs. Malcolm X as Civil Rights Leaders
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2022, October 15). Rosa Parks and Act of Civil Rights Defiance. https://ivypanda.com/essays/rosa-parks-and-act-of-civil-rights-defiance/

"Rosa Parks and Act of Civil Rights Defiance." IvyPanda , 15 Oct. 2022, ivypanda.com/essays/rosa-parks-and-act-of-civil-rights-defiance/.

IvyPanda . (2022) 'Rosa Parks and Act of Civil Rights Defiance'. 15 October.

IvyPanda . 2022. "Rosa Parks and Act of Civil Rights Defiance." October 15, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/rosa-parks-and-act-of-civil-rights-defiance/.

1. IvyPanda . "Rosa Parks and Act of Civil Rights Defiance." October 15, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/rosa-parks-and-act-of-civil-rights-defiance/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Rosa Parks and Act of Civil Rights Defiance." October 15, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/rosa-parks-and-act-of-civil-rights-defiance/.