Rosa Parks
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Real Identity: Rosa Louise McCauley Parks
Affiliation(s): NAACP
Skills: Activism
Rosa Parks was born in Tuskegee, Alabama on Febraury 4, 1913. In her college years, she dropped out to help care for her ailing grandmother. In the South, the racist Jim Crow Laws segregated whites and blacks in every imaginable facet of life. Even in public transportation, blacks were given a demeaning secondary status and would have to give up their seat to a white or even the use of a bus to whites. In the 1940's, the timid Parks experienced the Civil Rights Movement as a secretary for the Montgomery branch of the NAACP and was employed at the Maxwell Air Force Base, where segregation didn't exist.
On December 1, 1955 around 6 pm, she boarded a bus. Usually, black people were allowed to sit in the middle row until the front was filled with whites and they would have to move to the back to a "colored" section. When Parks refused to get up, she was arrested for disorderly conduct and sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott and Martin Luthor King, Jr.