Remebering Rosa Parks: the life and legacy of 'The mother of the Civil Rights Movement'

Parks wasn't the first to be defiant. In the year before Parks was arrested, three Black females, including 15-year-old Claudette Colvin, had been arrested for refusing to give up their seats to White men. And the Montgomery Bus Boycott was not the first. Blacks in Baton Rouge, La., had staged a boycott in the summer of 1953. A year later, in 1954, the Supreme Court handed down the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision banning segregated education in public schools.

But civil rights activist Andrew Young said Parks' case galvanized the Freedom Movement, perhaps because it was the"purity of her character," saying to everyone in Montgomery and across the South that if Parks could be thrown in jail then no one was safe.

The argument could be raised that without Parks there would be no King, no Freedom Rides, no sit-ins (at least not until some time later). After her arrest, there were mass demonstrations that eventually changed every aspect of life in America for Blacks. From schools, to work to housing and education, discriminatory laws began to fall--and many historians say that it was Parks" actions on that December day that served as the catalyst that would give courage to thousands upon thousands of people in other cities.

It was "by the sheer force of her will, she set in motion a revolution that continues to reverberate in nation after nation and remains an inspiration to liberation movements everywhere," Coretta Scott King says.

Shortly after the bus boycott had ended, Parks and her husband Raymond Parks--both of whom were active in the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP--lost their jobs and had received numerous death threats. They eventually moved to Detroit, where, for the next eight years, they lived an uneventful life. She struggled to find regular work, even moving to Virginia for a short time to work at Hampton College.

In 1965, newly elected Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) hired Parks to work for him in his Detroit office. She had worked in his campaign and continued to work in Conyers' office for the next 20 years. "Can you imagine coming to work, and you have Rosa Parks sitting in your office?" Conyers said at Parks funeral. "I went through some adjustment. This was a celebrity staffer if there ever was one."

Since her recent death in Detroit at age 92, churches, civil rights groups and every level of government have paid tribute to her. The nation took part in a weeklong celebration of Parks' life, during which her coffin was transported from Detroit to Montgomery to Washington, D.C., where she lay in state in a historic ceremony in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol, and back to Detroit for a moving funeral service and burial.

Parks' funeral, scheduled to last three hours, went some seven hours as African-American leaders, politicians, and even one former U.S. president, took the podium to speak on the impact she had on America and the world. "I believe in short weddings and long funerals," the Rev. Jesse Jackson told the 4,000 people who had gathered at Greater Grace Temple in Detroit. "Some people's lives are worthy of taking the time to say good-bye."