Born in Tuskegee, Alabama on February 4th 1913 to James McCauley and Leona Edwards, young Rosa grew up as a small child due to poor health and suffered constantly with chronic tonsillitis. (transition maybe) Her father, a carpenter, and her mother, a school teacher, separated shortly after Rosa’s brother, Sylvester, was born in 1915. Rosa then moved to her grandparents farm in a small town near Montgomery called Pine Level. Here she spent the rest of her childhood with her single mother.
Even at a young age, Rosa was strongly connected to racial segregation. Jim Crow laws had been practiced for 36 years before Rosa Parks was even born and were still being practiced throughout her early years. These laws established different rules for black
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E.D. Nixon, the president of the local NAACP president, used Park’s arrest to form a boycott against the second-class treatment of African Americans by the Montgomery public transportation system. 75% of bus riders were black so the city would have to pay attention to this. Just one day after the arrest, flyers crowded the streets of that Alabama town calling for all to walk to where they wanted to go on Monday, December 5th instead of riding a bus. Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph Abernathy, reverends of the two most populous African American churches, were called upon to help with the boycott. Hesitant at first, they both ultimately decided to participate and decided that until the busses were no segregated, the boycott would continue. As King once said, “The great glory of American democracy is the right to protest for right.” In order to help people on longer trips or rides around town, the churches bought station wagons and cars to transport them, although the majority walked. Miles upon miles of walking and carpooling was finally over 381 days later. November 13th 1956: the U.S. Supreme court made a statement saying that the segregation laws violated the 14th amendment of the U.S. Constitution. On December 20th, Martin Luther King proclaimed: “The year old protest against city buses is officially called off, and the Negro citizens of Montgomery are urged to return to the buses tomorrow morning on a nonsegregated basis.” The boycott had ended and for once, the equal rights movement had won. Rosa was one of the first to enjoy this luxury that had been previously denied to her and thousands of