60 Fun Facts About Rosa Parks

By what honorific is Rosa Parks sometimes known?

Mother of the civil rights movement is the title her 1955 bus stand earned her, yet she was no newcomer: she had already spent twelve years working for the NAACP.

Rosa Parks sat behind the reserved front rows, so why did the driver order her to stand?

A white man had no seat once the front rows filled, so the driver told all four Black riders in her row to stand. Three got up; she stayed where she was.

How long did the Montgomery bus boycott last?

381 days is how long a protest first called for a single Monday kept going, until a Supreme Court order reached Montgomery in December 1956.

Rosa Parks made history in Montgomery, but in which Alabama town was she born?

Tuskegee was home only briefly: her parents separated when she was a toddler, and she grew up on a farm in Pine Level.

What was Rosa Parks's maiden name?

McCauley gave way to the name the world knows in 1932, when at 19 she married Raymond Parks, who pushed her to go back and finish high school.

Rosa Parks's father left when she was small, so who guarded her childhood home from the Klan with a shotgun?

Her grandfather, Sylvester Edwards, sat up with a shotgun when Klan violence surged after World War I, and six-year-old Rosa sometimes kept vigil beside him.

Rosa Parks was a lifelong member of which church denomination?

African Methodist Episcopal churches were themselves born of protest: free Black Philadelphians founded the denomination to escape discrimination in white-run Methodist pews, and Parks stayed in it all her life.

Rosa Parks's husband Raymond, who taught himself to read, earned his living in which trade?

Barber Raymond Parks cut hair in downtown Montgomery and at first got nowhere with Rosa; he won her round and proposed on their second date.

Which famous case did Rosa and Raymond Parks raise defence funds for soon after their marriage?

The Scottsboro Boys were nine Black teenagers falsely accused of rape in Alabama in 1931. The defence work was dangerous enough that Raymond at first urged Rosa to stay out of it.

Why did Rosa Parks leave high school at 16, only earning her diploma at 20?

To nurse sick relatives, first her dying grandmother and then her mother, she quit in 11th grade and cleaned houses. She went back after marrying and finished in 1933, when few of her neighbours had diplomas.

Rosa Parks worked in the 1940s at which military installation in her home city of Montgomery?

Maxwell Air Force Base, then called Maxwell Field, later employed her husband as well: Raymond worked there until the bus boycott cost him the job.

What position did Parks hold in the Montgomery NAACP from December 1943?

Secretary meant far more than taking minutes: she travelled Alabama investigating cases of racist violence, from police brutality to rape and murder.

Rosa Parks was twice turned away before finally achieving what in 1945?

Registering to vote took her three attempts over two years. Having got through, she helped turn the local NAACP branch toward signing up other Black voters.

In her NAACP role, Parks investigated the 1944 gang rape of which Black woman from Abbeville?

Recy Taylor's attackers were never indicted, though at least one confessed. Parks helped found a committee whose letter-writing campaign pressed Alabama's governor to act.

Which activist training centre in Tennessee did Parks attend in the summer of 1955?

Highlander Folk School, an interracial training ground for labour and civil rights organisers, had Black and white students living and eating together as equals. Her bus arrest came that December.

Which white couple employed Parks as a seamstress and helped bail her out after her arrest?

Clifford and Virginia Durr did more than help with bail: Clifford, a lawyer, went on to advise on her case, and Virginia's brother-in-law was Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black.

Which bus driver had Rosa Parks arrested, having thrown her off his bus back in 1943?

James F. Blake had put her off his bus twelve years earlier, tugging her coat sleeve when she refused to get off and re-board through the back door. In 1955 she happened to catch his bus again.

Which 15-year-old was arrested for refusing to give up her Montgomery bus seat nine months before Parks?

Claudette Colvin was passed over when local leaders wanted a face for the cause, yet she had the last word as a plaintiff in the federal lawsuit that ended bus segregation.

Rosa Parks wrote that she was not physically tired on the bus that day, only tired of what?

Giving in was the only thing she was tired of, she wrote. At 42 she was neither old nor worn out, whatever the legend of the weary woman with aching feet says.

What did Parks say when the driver threatened to have her arrested?

'You may do that.' was all she said to the threat. She did not raise her voice or struggle, and went quietly when two policemen boarded to arrest her.

Rosa Parks said she thought of which recent murder victim when she refused to give up her bus seat?

Emmett Till, a Chicago 14-year-old, had been lynched in Mississippi that summer. Four days before her arrest, Parks sat in a packed Montgomery church hearing how his killers had walked free.

Which organisation produced 35,000 leaflets calling for a one-day boycott on the day of Parks's trial?

The Women's Political Council moved overnight: Jo Ann Robinson, a professor at Alabama State College, slipped onto campus with two students and ran the leaflets off on a mimeograph before morning.

Which young pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church was elected to lead the boycott organisation?

Martin Luther King Jr. was 26 and new in town, which Parks counted as his great advantage: he had not been in Montgomery long enough to make strong friends or enemies.

How much was Rosa Parks fined when a Montgomery court convicted her of breaking the segregation law?

$10 was the fine, with $4 in court costs on top, and she paid neither: her lawyers filed an appeal instead, and she later said flatly that she never paid any fine.

Cheered at the Holt Street mass meeting, why did Rosa Parks stay silent that night?

Told she had said enough, Parks had asked whether she should say anything. The woman whose arrest filled the church sat through a standing ovation and never addressed it.

What temporary role did Parks take in the boycott's car-pool system?

Dispatcher filled her suddenly empty days: Montgomery Fair department store let her go about a month into the boycott, so she spent her time matching stranded riders with volunteer cars.

Which Supreme Court case ended segregation on Montgomery's buses?

Browder v. Gayle carries another rider's name because Parks was left off it: her own conviction was still stuck in Alabama's state courts, which could have got the federal suit thrown out.

Rosa Parks's famous mugshot dates not from her bus arrest but from 1956, when she was charged with what?

Organising an illegal boycott was the charge: in February 1956 a grand jury indicted Parks and dozens of other leaders under an old state law, and booking photo 7053 was taken when she turned herself in.

Which congressman hired Parks to work in his Detroit office after his 1964 election?

John Conyers was returning a favour: she had volunteered on the young lawyer's 1964 campaign, and the office job he gave her ended years of money trouble and lasted until she retired in 1988.

Rosa Parks was introduced to the crowd but not asked to speak at which 1963 event?

The March on Washington kept its main speeches for men. Parks was one of the women honoured in a brief tribute, and later wrote that women were not allowed to play much of a role.

Rosa Parks gave the 1996 eulogy for which 'Negroes with Guns' author, who spent the 1960s in exile?

Robert F. Williams had armed his North Carolina NAACP branch against the Klan before fleeing to Cuba and then China. At his funeral, Parks said what he did should go down in history and never be forgotten.

Shortly after a jury cleared her of murder and kidnapping in 1972, which activist did Rosa Parks introduce to a Detroit crowd?

Angela Davis had gone from the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list to a full acquittal. Parks, who had followed the case from Detroit, welcomed her to the stage as a dear sister who had suffered much persecution.

Rosa Parks, then 82, spoke at which 1995 gathering in Washington?

The Million Man March was billed as a day for Black men, yet Louis Farrakhan invited Parks to speak, alongside Maya Angelou, Dorothy Height and Betty Shabazz.

The institute Rosa Parks co-founded in 1987 sends teenagers on summer tours that retrace which historic route?

The Underground Railroad is where Pathways to Freedom begins: the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute puts students aged 11 to 17 on a coach to follow the escape routes north, some years as far as Canada.

Which visiting leader spotted Rosa Parks in a Detroit receiving line in 1990 and began chanting her name?

Nelson Mandela, only months out of a South African prison, had tears in his eyes as he chanted 'Ro-sa Parks' until it became a shout. Parks, then 77, was part of the city's welcoming party.

Beaten and robbed in her Detroit home in 1994, what did Rosa Parks say she did for her young attacker?

Prayed for him, she wrote, and for the conditions that had made him that way. Commentators called the attack proof of a lost generation; Parks urged people not to read too much into it.

Which pizza-chain founder offered to pay Parks's housing costs indefinitely after the 1994 assault?

Mike Ilitch of Little Caesars read in the newspaper that a Detroit judge was looking for a safer home for her, rang him and offered to pay for it for as long as necessary.

Which president gave Rosa Parks both the Presidential Medal of Freedom and, three years later, the Congressional Gold Medal?

Bill Clinton told the 1999 ceremony that news of her protest had reached him as a nine-year-old in segregated Arkansas: he and his friends began sitting at the back of the bus.

Which hip-hop duo did Parks sue in 1999 for using her name as a song title?

Outkast put her name on a 1998 song whose chorus tells everybody to move to the back of the bus. Her lawyers said it traded on her name without permission; the case was settled out of court in 2005.

Which museum restored and displays the bus on which Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat?

The Henry Ford museum, Dearborn, restored it after an Alabama man had quietly kept the retired bus from being junked. Visitors can board it and take a seat, as Barack Obama did in 2012.

After her death in 2005, Rosa Parks became the first woman to do what?

To lie in honor in the Capitol Rotunda is how Congress grants private citizens the tribute that presidents receive. For two days mourners filed past the casket of a seamstress who never held office.

Which singer performed at Parks's memorial service in Detroit?

Aretha Franklin, a Detroiter herself, sang at the seven-hour service at Greater Grace Temple in November 2005. The same church would host her own funeral thirteen years later.

In which part of the US Capitol has a bronze Rosa Parks sat since 2013?

National Statuary Hall is lined with figures sent by the states. Hers, the Capitol's first full-length likeness of a Black American, was commissioned by Congress itself and belongs to no state.

An artist shipped Rosa Parks's condemned Detroit home overseas in 2016 and rebuilt it in his garden in which country?

Germany is where Ryan Mendoza rebuilt the house, which her niece had bought back for $500, beside his own home. It returned to America in pieces in 2018.

Which actress played Parks in the 2002 biopic The Rosa Parks Story?

Angela Bassett earned an Emmy nomination for the CBS film, which Julie Dash directed. In it, the boycott's young leader was played by his own son.

What is named 284996 Rosaparks?

An asteroid in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter. NASA's WISE infrared space telescope spotted it in June 2010, and the name Rosaparks was approved four years later.

The 'Rosa Louise' in Rosa Parks's birth name honoured which two relatives?

Her two grandmothers, Rose and Louisa, supplied 'Rosa Louise'. It was on Rose's farm at Pine Level that she grew up after her parents separated.

Seeing a photograph of which former classmate prompted Parks to start attending NAACP meetings in 1943?

Johnnie Carr had been her classmate at Miss White's school for girls. Parks had not realised women could take part until she saw Carr's picture in the Alabama Tribune; Carr went on to lead the Montgomery Improvement Association from 1967.

Rosa Parks went back to Alabama to support a new Lowndes County party whose ballot emblem was which animal?

A black panther, crouching: Alabama law required every party to have an emblem, and its chairman said a panther pushed into a corner comes out fighting. Oakland's Black Panther Party soon borrowed it.

Which Pullman porter and NAACP organiser pushed to make Rosa Parks's arrest the test case against bus segregation?

E. D. Nixon had been looking for the right plaintiff for years. He helped bail her out, then sat in her home that night persuading her, her husband and her mother that she was the one.

Which university opened a Rosa Parks museum on the Montgomery corner where she was arrested?

Troy University built it on its Montgomery campus at the site of her arrest. Parks was guest of honour when it opened on 1 December 2000, 45 years to the day after the bus ride.

Rosa Parks, long cast as a meek seamstress, described which Black leader as her personal hero?

Malcolm X was the man she called her personal hero, her biographer Jeanne Theoharis records. The two met more than once in Detroit, and she shared his belief in self-defence and his impatience with gradual change.

Which young lawyer, one of only two Black attorneys in Montgomery, defended Rosa Parks at her brief trial?

Fred Gray and Charles Langford were the city's only Black attorneys. The hearing lasted half an hour at most, by some accounts five minutes, and Gray appealed the guilty verdict at once.

Soon after moving to Detroit, Rosa Parks left alone to be hostess of a college guest house in which city?

Hampton, Virginia, is home to the Hampton Institute, which hired her for its Holly Tree Inn in October 1957. She hoped her husband and mother could join her; no flat came up, and she went back to Detroit at the end of 1958.

Which Detroit street, the epicentre of the 1967 riot, was later renamed Rosa Parks Boulevard?

12th Street is where a police raid on an after-hours bar set off five days of rioting in 1967, leaving 43 dead. In 1976 the scarred street was renamed Rosa Parks Boulevard.

Which secretary of state said at Parks's funeral that without her 'I probably would not be standing here'?

Condoleezza Rice was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1954 and grew up under segregation; she was a year old when Parks refused to give up her seat.

What does the Rosa Parks statue in the US Capitol show her wearing?

Her outfit from the day of her arrest includes the round hat, glasses and cloth coat; on the day of the 2013 unveiling, the Supreme Court across the street heard a challenge to the Voting Rights Act.

In which European capital did a station named after Rosa Parks open in 2015?

Paris gave half the stops on its new T3b tram line women's names, Ella Fitzgerald among them, and the rail station first planned as Évangile took Parks's name too.

When Joe Biden became president in 2021, a bust of Rosa Parks went on display in which room?

The Oval Office makeover that day also brought in busts of Cesar Chavez and Robert F. Kennedy, while the Winston Churchill bust displayed under Donald Trump went out.

In 2019, Mattel released a doll in Parks's likeness as part of which Barbie series?

Inspiring Women added Parks and astronaut Sally Ride on Women's Equality Day 2019, which marks the 19th Amendment becoming law in 1920.