Rosa Louise McCauley Parks

Rosa Louise McCauley Parks died in Detroit on October 24, 2005. She was ninety-two. Born in Tuskegee, Alabama, on February 4, 1913, and raised near Montgomery, she was a seamstress and an NAACP secretary long before a bus driver asked her to move. She had already sat in rooms taking down the names of the beaten and the unregistered. On December 1, 1955, she stayed in her seat. The boycott that followed was a city's decision, not a mood. Ministers and lawyers needed a defendant who could carry the case; Parks had been preparing without knowing the date. After the buses changed she and Raymond Parks left Alabama under threat and built a quieter life in Detroit, in the office of Representative John Conyers and in a house that did not ask her to perform tiredness. She wanted to be remembered as a citizen who kept showing up. The Capitol rotunda held her. Woodlawn in Detroit keeps her.