60 free Rosa Parks trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Rosa Parks trivia quiz goes well beyond the bus. It starts in Tuskegee and Pine Level, Alabama, with a girl who picked cotton for 50 cents a day and finished her first quilt at ten, then follows her through the Scottsboro Boys campaign, the NAACP secretaryship, three attempts to register to vote, the Recy Taylor case and a summer at the Highlander Folk School before December 1, 1955. From there it covers the arrest, the trial, the 381-day boycott and Browder v. Gayle, and then the long second act in Detroit: John Conyers's office, the Black power movement, apartheid, the 1994 assault, the Congressional Gold Medal and lying in state in the Capitol. The easy questions are ones most people know: the city, the bus, the boycott. The medium ones ask about her family, her jobs, her arrest and the leaders around her. The hard ones dig into James F. Blake, Claudette Colvin, the $10 fine, the Outkast lawsuit and the asteroid that bears her name. It suits a Black History Month lesson, a civil rights unit or anyone who thinks they know the whole story. Every answer has been checked against a reference encyclopaedia, and each question shows its explanation and citation once you have answered.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01By what honorific is Rosa Parks sometimes known?
Mother of the civil rights movement
Her 1955 arrest in Montgomery, Alabama, sparked the bus boycott that made her famous.
Q 02On what date was Rosa Parks arrested on the bus?
December 1, 1955
She had left work at 5 p.m., stopped at a drugstore and boarded around 5:30 without noticing who was driving.
Q 03How long did the Montgomery bus boycott last?
381 days
It ended on December 20, 1956, the day the Supreme Court ordered the buses integrated.
Q 04In which Alabama town was Rosa Parks born in 1913?
Tuskegee
She was named Rosa Louise after her two grandmothers, Rose and Louisa.
Q 05What was Rosa Parks's maiden name?
McCauley
Her mother Leona was a teacher and her father James a carpenter and mason.
Q 06How much per day were Black children paid to pick cotton where six-year-old Parks worked?
50 cents
She also learned quilting and sewing, finishing her first quilt at ten and her first dress at eleven.
Q 07Which church denomination did Parks join at age two and remain in all her life?
African Methodist Episcopal
Her Detroit memorial was held at the Metropolitan AME Church.
Q 08Rosa's future husband Raymond Parks first impressed her by owning what?
An automobile
She called him the 'first real activist' she had ever met; they married in December 1932.
Q 09Which famous case did Rosa and Raymond Parks raise defence funds for soon after their marriage?
The Scottsboro Boys
Nine Black youths had been falsely accused of raping two white women on a train and sentenced to death.
Q 10What percentage of Black people in Alabama held a high school diploma when Parks earned hers in 1933?
7%
Raymond encouraged her to finish; she then worked as a nurse's aide and seamstress.
Q 11Working at which fully integrated military base in 1941 'opened her eyes' to an alternative to Jim Crow?
Maxwell Air Force Base
On base she rode buses beside white coworkers; on the way home she had to ride segregated ones.
Q 12What position did Parks hold in the Montgomery NAACP from December 1943?
Secretary
She said she took it because 'I was the only woman there... and I was too timid to say no'.
Q 13How many attempts did it take Parks to register to vote in Alabama?
Three
In 1940 less than 0.1 percent of Black Montgomerians were registered; she succeeded in 1945.
Q 21In front of which theatre did the bus stop when the driver demanded the middle-row passengers move?
The Empire Theater
Everyone else near her complied; she stayed seated.
Q 22Which organisation produced 35,000 leaflets calling for a one-day boycott on the day of Parks's trial?
Women's Political Council
President Jo Ann Robinson ran them off on a college mimeograph under the guise of grading exams.
Q 23Which young pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church was elected to lead the boycott organisation?
Martin Luther King Jr.
Q 14In her NAACP role, Parks investigated the 1944 gang rape of which Black woman from Abbeville?
Recy Taylor
The campaign for justice was called the strongest of its kind in a decade, though no one was ever indicted.
Q 15Which activist training centre in Tennessee did Parks attend in the summer of 1955?
Highlander Folk School
She was mentored there by Septima Clark and remembered it as a rare time she felt no racial hostility.
Q 16Which white couple employed Parks as a seamstress and helped bail her out after her arrest?
Clifford and Virginia Durr
E. D. Nixon drove to the jail with them and paid her bail.
Q 17Which bus driver had Rosa Parks arrested, having thrown her off his bus back in 1943?
James F. Blake
She said if she had noticed him at the wheel she would not have boarded.
Q 18Which 15-year-old was arrested for refusing to give up her Montgomery bus seat nine months before Parks?
Claudette Colvin
Local leaders decided she was not a suitable test case; she became a plaintiff in the federal lawsuit instead.
Q 19How old was Parks when she was arrested on the bus?
42
'I was not old,' she said. 'No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.'
Q 20What did Parks say when the driver threatened to have her arrested?
'You may do that.'
She thought about resisting physically but decided she had no way of fighting back.
The Montgomery Improvement Association was formed on the afternoon of Parks's trial.
Q 24How much was Parks fined at her trial, plus $4 in court fees?
$10
The trial took between five and thirty minutes and her lawyer Fred Gray immediately appealed.
Q 25Roughly how many attended the Holt Street Baptist Church mass meeting the evening of Parks's trial?
15,000
The crowd called for Parks to speak, but she was told she had 'said enough' and did not.
Q 26What temporary role did Parks take in the boycott's car-pool system?
Dispatcher
She was fired from her seamstress job at Montgomery Fair in January 1956, and Raymond lost his a week later.
Q 27Which Supreme Court case ended segregation on Montgomery's buses?
Browder v. Gayle
Parks was removed as a plaintiff so her own state case could not be used to get the federal suit dismissed.
Q 28To which state did Parks move in 1957, after threats and financial hardship in Montgomery?
Michigan
Her brother Sylvester lived there; the MIA, embarrassed, raised $500 as a going-away present.
Q 29Which congressman hired Parks to work in his Detroit office after his 1964 election?
John Conyers
She had persuaded King to appear with the novice candidate, boosting his campaign.
Q 30How did Parks later describe the 1963 March on Washington?
'A great occasion, but women were not allowed to play much of a role'
No women were included in the delegation sent to meet the Kennedy administration.