Changemaker 16: Rosa Parks

Today's changemaker is Rosa Louise McCauley Parks. Born in 1913 in Tuskegee, Alabama, U.S., she became an activist who is honored as the “First Lady of Civil Rights'' and the “Mother of the Freedom Movement.” She refused to surrender her seat to a white man on a Montgomery bus in 1955 which led to her arrest. The aftermath of the event catalyzed the civil rights movement. Her resistance encouraged people of the local Black community, and so it initiated the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Her success led racial segregation of public facilities to an end, and so she became a national symbol of dignity and power fighting against racial segregation.

She attended a laboratory high school at the Alabama State Teachers’ College for Negroes and after that she worked as a seamstress at a local department store and was secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP. She had also attended the Highlander Folk School, a Tennessee center for training activists for workers' rights and racial equality. 

Having served as secretary and receptionist to John Conyers, an African-American US Representative, having been an active member in the Black Power movement and having supported the political prisoners in the US, Parks is considered a national symbol. She was a civil rights leader and activist who was awarded the Martin Luther King Jr. Award by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal.

Read more about this legendary changemaker here.

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Photo credit: Don Cravens/Getty/approx. 1955