Rosa Parks made many achievements in her lifetime, from social influences, to cultural influences, to economic influences. Rosa Parks was an African American women in the early 1900s. Since she was African American, her place in the world was to pretty much do anything white people said too. However, Rosa Parks saw more to herself than someone to obey to whites, and stood up for herself. She stood up for herself in many ways, and some more shocking than others. Parks knew what consequences could become of her actions, but she was tired of being treated differently for the color of her skin. Therefore, she took a stand and wouldn't let it go until the problem was fixed. Separate is not equal.
Rosa Parks received many awards for her courageous
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In 1980, Rosa Parks was awarded with the Martin Luther King Jr. award by the NAACP. 3 years later, Rosa Parks was inducted into the Michigan Women’s Hall of Fame. She then went a few years without anything else until 1990. In 1990, she had the honor of being a part of the welcoming party for Nelson Mandela, who had been recently imprisoned in South America. Nelson Mandela had recently been imprisoned because he and eight other African National Congress leaders were convicted of sabotage and conspiracy to overthrow the government, and were sentenced to life in jail in 1964. Then, in September 1992, she was awarded the Peace Abbey Courage of Conscience award for …show more content…
She helped in the WPC (Women’s Political Council) with the removal of the segregation laws in Montgomery. Parks was also the Secretary of the Montgomery branch of NAACP and her friendship with President E.D. Nixon influenced her courageous actions. Beside these two influences, she had two more that were the most important. Parks used the courage she had seen in her mother Leona McCauley, and her maternal grandparents. Rosa and her family lived in constant fear of the Ku Klux Klan. Her grandfather, Sylvester Edwards clutched his old gun to his chest on nights of the KKK attacks. He had been born before the emancipation, so he grew up in slavery and had been beaten so badly on the plantations that he still suffered from a limp in his old age. He swore to himself that he would defend the family he worked so hard for. Rosa Parks held a lot of fear of racism based things ever since she was little, but she turned that fear into motivation to make a change instead of turning it into something negative and damaging. This motivation to do the right thing was built in her from a young age, and with influence from her family, helped mold her into the hero we have come to know today. She acquired a fondness of reading from a young age, and stories of inspiration such as Harriet Tubman, who escaped slavery in 1849 and began helping other through the underground railroad also sparked an