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TDIH, on Feb.. 4, 1913, Rosa Parks was born. Her grandfather was a supporter of Marcus Garvey; when Klan violence escalated after WWI, he would sit out at night with his shotgun to protect their family home. As a 6 year old, she would sometimes sit vigil with him. 
At the age of 19, she married a politically-active barber Raymond Parks-"the first real activist I ever met"-who was organizing to protect & defend the Scottsboro boys from execution. This was dangerous work--she recalled late night meetings with guns on the table for protection.
At the age of 30, she joined the local NAACP because she wanted to vote. This was WWII & she was galled that Black people including her brother Sylvester were serving in the military and yet most weren't allowed to vote at home. After 3 tries, she succeeded in registering.
Alongside E.D. Nixon & Johnnie Carr, she helped transform Montgomery's NAACP into a more activist branch. They pressed for voter registration, organized against legal lynching including the case of 16 yr old Jeremiah Reeves, and sought justice for Black women who had been raped.
At the age of 42,"pushed as far as she could be pushed" & angered by the acquittal of the 2 men who'd killed Emmett Till, she refused to give up her seat on the bus & was arrested. That night she decided to pursue a legal case. The Women's Political Council called a bus boycott.
Five weeks later, she was fired;Raymond lost his job.They never found steady work in Montgomery again. She spent the year of the boycott maintaining the elaborate car pool system that sustained the boycott & traveling the country raising money & attention for the boycott at home.
Eight months after the boycott's successful end, still facing death threats and unable to find steady work, the Parks left Montgomery for Detroit. There in "the Northern promised land that wasn't", she would spend the next four decades fighting the racism of the Jim Crow North.
At the age of 50 she met Malcolm X for the first time.He was awed by her courage; she would later describe him as her personal hero. They saw each other for the last time a week before he was assassinated.She saw no contradiction loving the work of Malcolm X & Martin Luther King.
In 1967, at age of 54, she served on the People's Tribunal, convened after Detroit police killed 3 black teenagers at the Algiers Motel & the city refused to indict the officers.She served on prisoner defense committees for Angela Davis, JoAnn Little, Wilmington 10, & Gary Tyler.
She saw the struggle for human rights in global terms. An early opponent of US involvement in Vietnam, she took part in numerous antiwar protests & organizations.She spoke out for US divestment from South African apartheid & decried US policy in Central America in the 1980s.
She worked for Cong. John Conyers from 1965-1988 doing constituent needs in his Detroit office. She believed in public assistance, expanded public housing & need for reparations. In 1987, she founded the Rosa & Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development for youth leadership.
To the end of her life at age 92, she believed that the struggle was not over and there was much more work to be done. She placed her greatest hope in the energy & spirit & militancy of young people. "Freedom fighters never retire," she once told an audience. She never did.
Rosa Parks hated that 'tired feet' story: “I didn’t tell anyone my feet were hurting. It was just popular... because they wanted to give some excuse other than the fact that I didn’t want to be pushed around.” For more on her life of freedom fighting, see RosaParksBiography.org.
