Parks, Rosa Lee, n�e McCauley 1913-
US civil rights activist

Born in Tuskegee, Alabama, she worked as a seamstress and housekeeper and served as a secretary of the Montgomery, Alabama branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) from 1943 to 1956. In December 1955 she was arrested and fined when she refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man in Montgomery, choosing instead to disobey the segregated seating policies common in the South. This incident prompted Martin Luther King, Jnr, and the Montgomery Improvement Association to organize a city-wide boycott of the bus company and file a federal suit challenging the constitutionality of the segregation laws. The boycott continued until the following year, when the Supreme Court declared the city's segregated seating policies unconstitutional. Parks and her husband lost their jobs as a result of the boycott and were obliged to move to Detroit, where they remained active in civil rights but endured difficult times until 1965, when she began more than 20 years of employment as secretary to a congressman. Her refusal to yield her seat in 1955 and the events that followed are regarded as the beginning of the modern US civil rights movement.