Rosa Parks was born on February 4, 1913 in Tuskegee, Alabama to Leona, a teacher, and James McCauley, a carpenter. When her parents separated, she moved with her mother to Pine Level, just outside the state capital, Montgomery. She grew up on a farm with her parental grandparents, mother, and younger brother Sylvester. They all were members of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, a century-old independent black religious group founded by free blacks in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in the early nineteenth century. Rosa attended a rural school until she was eleven. Parks recalled going to elementary school in Pine Level, where school buses took white students to their new school and black students had to walk to theirs. Repeatedly bullied …show more content…
She paid her fare and sat in an empty seat in the first row of back seats reserved for blacks in the "colored" section. Near the middle of the bus, her row was directly behind the ten seats reserved for white passengers. Initially, she did not notice that the bus driver was the same man who had left her in the rain in 1943. As the bus traveled along its regular route, all of the white-only seats in the bus filled up. The bus reached the third stop and several white passengers boarded. The bus was filled up to it capacity. The bus driver moved the "colored" section sign behind Parks and demanded that four black people give up their seats in the middle section so that the white passengers could sit. On Sunday, December 4, 1955, plans for the Montgomery Bus Boycott were announced at black churches in the area, and a front-page article in the Montgomery Advertiser helped spread the word. At a church rally that night, those attending agreed to continue the boycott until they were treated with the level of respect they expected, until black drivers were hired, and until seating in the middle of the bus was handled on a first-come basis. It rained that day, but the black community kept on in their boycott. Some rode in carpools, while others traveled in black-operated cabs that charged the same fare as the bus, 10 cents. Most of the remainder of the 40,000 black commuters walked, some as far as 20 miles. After her arrest, Parks became an icon of the Civil Rights Movement but suffered hardships as a result. Due to economic sanctions used against activists, she lost her job at the department store. Her husband quit his job after his boss forbade him to talk about his wife or the legal case. Parks traveled and spoke extensively about the issues. In 1957, Raymond and Rosa Parks left Montgomery for Hampton, Virginia mostly because she was unable to