Rosa Parks was born Rosa Louise McCauley on February 4, 1913, in
Tuskegee, Alabama. Her mother, Leona (), was a teacher from
Pine Level, Alabama. Her father, James McCauley, was a
carpenter and
mason from
Abbeville, Alabama. Her name was a
portmanteau of her maternal and paternal grandmothers' names: Rose and Louisa. In addition to her
African ancestry, one of her great-grandfathers was of
Scotch-Irish descent, and one of her great-grandmothers was of partial
Native American ancestry. Her maternal grandfather, Sylvester Edwards, was the child of an
enslaved woman and a
plantation owner's son. When she was a baby, Parks moved from Tuskegee to live with her father's family in Abbeville. When Parks and her parents arrived, the house became too crowded, and Parks's father was seldom home because of the itinerant nature of his job. As a result, Parks's mother left Abbeville with her, and the two relocated to Pine Level to live with Parks's mother's family. In Pine Level, Parks attended the
African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church, a century-old independent
Black denomination founded by free Blacks in
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in the early nineteenth century. Baptized at age two, she remained a member of the church throughout her life. Her mother worked as a teacher in the nearby community of
Spring Hill, where she lived during the week. While her mother was away, Parks lived with her grandparents on their family farm, where they grew fruit, pecan, and walnut trees and raised chickens and cows. At the age of six or seven, she began working on the plantation of Moses Hudson, who paid Black children 50 cents a day to
pick cotton. Parks also learned quilting and sewing from her mother, completing her first quilt at the age of 10 and her first dress at 11. Growing up in Alabama, Parks faced a society characterized by racial segregation and violence. Alabama and other southern states began implementing
segregationist policies during the 1870s and 1880s, shortly after the end of the
Civil War in 1865, culminating in a 1901
state constitutional convention that formally codified
Jim Crow segregation into law. This system enforced racial separation in nearly all aspects of life, including financial institutions, healthcare, religious facilities, burial grounds, and public transportation. Acts of racist violence were also widespread, with the
Ku Klux Klan intensifying its activity in Pine Level and across the United States
after the end of World War I. Parks later recalled that she "heard of a lot of black people being found dead" under mysterious circumstances during her childhood. Parks initially attended a one-room schoolhouse at the local Mount Zion
AME Zion church. When she was eleven or twelve, she began attending the
Montgomery Industrial School for Girls, where she received vocational training. After the school closed in 1928, she transferred to Booker T. Washington Junior High School, a
segregated public school. She then attended a
laboratory school set up by the
Alabama State Teachers College for Negroes, but dropped out to care for her ailing grandmother and mother. After leaving school, Parks worked on her family's farm and as a domestic worker in white households. Black women in Alabama who worked as domestic workers often experienced sexual violence. During the 1950s or '60s, Parks wrote an account of an incident where a white man named "Mr. Charlie" tried to sexually assault her. In her account, she claims that she verbally resisted Mr. Charlie's advances and denounced his racism. The account concludes with her trying to ignore him while reading a newspaper. Though the account may have been partially or entirely fictionalized, biographer
Jeanne Theoharis notes that many of the elements of the account "correspond to Parks's life", speculating that Parks "wrote [the account] as an allegory to suggest larger themes of domination and resistance", or that, "given that more than twenty-five years had passed before she wrote [the account] down, she augmented what she said to Charlie that evening with all the points that she had wished to make as she resisted his advances". In 1931, when she was 18, Rosa was introduced to her future husband,
Raymond Parks, by a mutual friend. He was 28. She was initially "[not] very interested in him" because of "some unhappy romantic experiences" and
because of his light skin. Raymond eventually persuaded Parks to ride with him in his car. At the time, automobile ownership was rare among Black men in Alabama. Parks described Raymond as the "first real activist" she had met, admiring his opposition to racial prejudice. The two married on December 18, 1932, at Rosa's mother's house. Soon after, they moved to a
rooming house in the
Centennial Hill neighborhood of Montgomery.
Early activism After their marriage, Rosa and Raymond became involved in the
Scottsboro Boys case, concerning a group of nine Black youths falsely accused of raping two white women on a train in
Paint Rock, Alabama. The nine were tried in
Scottsboro, Alabama, where they were sentenced to
death by electrocution. To raise support for their defense, Rosa and Raymond hosted fundraising meetings and gatherings for Scottsboro legal defenders at their house. According to historian
Robin Kelley, the couple also attended meetings of the
Communist Party USA, which helped bring attention to the Scottsboro Boys case. In 1933, Parks completed her high school education with encouragement from Raymond. At the time in Alabama, only 7% of Black people held a high school diploma. Subsequently, she worked as a nurse's aide at St. Margaret's Hospital, sewing to supplement her income. In 1941, she began working at
Maxwell Air Force Base, a training facility for air force cadets. The base was
fully integrated, and Parks was able to take public transit alongside her white coworkers on-base. However, when she returned home, she was required to use segregated buses, which frustrated her. According to Parks, her time at Maxwell "opened her eyes up", providing an "alternative reality to the ugly racial policies of Jim Crow". Parks began attending meetings of the Montgomery chapter of the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1943 after seeing a picture of a former classmate of hers,
Johnnie Carr, at a meeting. In December 1943, she was elected secretary of the chapter. Parks later explained that she accepted the role (which was considered a woman's position at the time) because "I was the only woman there, and they needed a secretary, and I was too timid to say no". She and Raymond were also members of the Voter's League, a local organization focused on increasing Black voter registration. There were several obstacles preventing Black people from registering to vote in Alabama during this period, including
poll taxes,
literacy tests, intrusive questions on voter registration applications, and retaliation by employers. In 1940, less than 0.1% of Black Montgomerians were registered to vote. Encouraged by NAACP activist
E. D. Nixon, Parks attempted to register three times beginning in 1943, succeeding in 1945. In her capacity as secretary, Parks began investigating the
gang rape of
Recy Taylor, a Black woman from Abbeville, in 1944. After a
grand jury declined to
indict the perpetrators, Parks and other civil rights activists organized "
The Committee for Equal Justice for Mrs. Recy Taylor", launching "the strongest campaign for equal justice to be seen in a decade", according to
The Chicago Defender. The campaign, which received nationwide attention, put pressure on Governor
Chauncey Sparks to take steps to prosecute Taylor's assailants. Sparks ultimately promised to investigate the case. The state failed to secure indictments for the assailants after a second grand jury hearing in 1945. Despite this, historian Danielle L. McGuire describes the movement for justice in the Recy Taylor case as "the largest and best organized of many efforts to draw attention to the ruthless heart of the racial caste system", arguing that it "brought the building blocks of the
Montgomery bus boycott together a decade earlier and kept them in place". Parks also organized support for
Jeremiah Reeves, who was accused of raping a white woman in 1952. Reeves was ultimately executed in 1957. Beginning in 1954, Parks worked as a seamstress for
Clifford and
Virginia Durr, a white couple. Politically
liberal and opposed to segregation, the Durrs became her friends. They encouraged, and eventually helped sponsor, Parks to attend the
Highlander Folk School, an activist training center in
Monteagle, Tennessee, in the summer of 1955. There, Parks was mentored by the veteran organizer
Septima Clark. Parks enjoyed her time at Highlander, where Black and white people worked, cooked, and lived together as equals. She later remembered it as one of the rare moments in her life when she felt no racial hostility and the first time in her adult life that she could envision a "unified society", describing how "people of all races and backgrounds" interacted harmoniously. In August 1955, she attended a Montgomery meeting concerning the lynching of
Emmett Till. According to Theoharis, Parks was "heartened by the attention that people managed to get to the [Till] case", since the custom was to "keep things covered up". ==Arrest and bus boycott==