Rosa Parks, borgerrettighedsikon

I have about a woman, named Rosa Parks. She was born February 4th in 1913 in Alabama, and died when she was 92 years old in 2005. Her father was a carpenter and her mother was a teacher. Her parents got divorced when she was only 2 years old, she moved with her mother to her grandparents farm in Pine Level, which is just right outside Montgomery in Alabama. She grew up on a farm with her grandparents, mother and her younger brother, Sylvester. Her mom homeschooled her until she was eleven, then she went to a school for girls only where she took academic and vocational courses. Rosa wanted to go to a laboratory school for secondary education, but she had to drop out, because her grandmother and later her mother became ill, so she had to take care of them. Her full name is Rosa Louise McCauley Parks. In December 1943, Rosa married Raymond Parks; he was a barber from Montgomery at her moms house. After the marriage, Rosa took numerous jobs, ranging from domestic worker to hospital aide. She is known as ‘’ the first lady of civil rights’’ and ‘’ the mother of freedom movement’’, and I will tell you why she is called that. On December 1st in 1995, when she was 42, she refused to sit on the backseat in the bus, because she was black. Because of that, the police officer arrested her. Rosas act made her an important symbol of the Modern Civil Movement, and then she became an international icon of resistance to racial segregation. At the time of this she was a secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and had a little while after that, attended the Highlander Folk School, which is a Tennessee centre for workers rights and racial equality. A few years later after this, she suffered for it; she lost her job as a seamstress in a local department store. But then she had chosen to move to Michigan in Detroit where she found a new job. From 1965 to 1988, she was a secretary and receptionist. After she got too old to work, she wrote an autobiography and lived a private life in Detroit. In her last years she suffered from dementia, which is a disease, and became involved in a lawsuit. During her lifetime she actually was awarded many honours for her courageous stand. There was the Rosa Parks Peace Price in 1994, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1996, and the Congressional Gold Medal in 1999. She got so famous that a library and museum is dedicated to her in Montgomery in Alabama