Rosa Parks has a special place in history because she stood up for her rights as an American. Her simple gesture of refusing to ride in the part of a bus reserved for black Americans led to an important change in the law.
Rosa was born on February, 1913 in Tuskagee, Alabama, the daughter of James and Leona McCauley. James was a carpenter and Leona was a teacher. Her father left home to find work when she was very young and Rosa and her brother spent most of their childhood with their mother on her parents’ farm. Her grandparents had been slaves and through their stories, Rosa learned firsthand how slaves had been badly treated. She knew “slavery” was not just a concept in a school textbook but something that her loved ones had experienced.
Rosa attended school in
...Pine Level, Alabama. It was a small school for black American children; there was another bigger school that was for white children, and was considered a better school. In Alabama in the 1920s many people did not believe that a good education was important for black children. Alabama is in the southern part of the country, in the area where slavery had been legal until the end of the Civil War in 1865. President Abraham Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Act in 1862 which granted slaves freedom but this could happen only if they were able to escape from the slave states. The United States was involved in a civil war over slavery and while it raged, slaves in the south were still bound to their owners. Once the war ended, slavery was abolished everywhere in the country.
Th
enslaved blacks of the slave states had achieved freedom and in a legal sense, the same rights as all other Americans. In reality, though, equality did not come with emancipation. In the 1880’s laws in the south were passed (called the Jim Crow laws) that allowed the legal separation of blacks and whites. This separation was called “segregation”.
With the end of the civil war the southern system of agriculture that depended on slave labor ended as well. The economy of the south suffered. Many black workers stayed in the south and were employed on the land, but it was a hard way to make a living. Some black Americans moved to northern states where many factories were being built and workers were desperately needed. In the north black women also found work in factories and others became house servants.
When Rosa grew up she married Raymond Parks, a barber. They moved to Montgomery, Alabama, a city much larger than Pine Level. Rosa had left school in eighth grade and was working as a dressmaker. Her husband encouraged her to complete high school and soon she had her diploma.
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