100th Birthday of Rosa Parks, the Civil Rights Icon

Civil rights icon Rosa Parks would have been 100 Feb. 4, 2013.

Rosa Parks is fingerprinted by police in Montgomery, Ala., Feb. 22, 1956, two months after refusing to give up her seat on a bus for a white passenger on Dec. 1, 1955. She was arrested with several others who violated segregation laws.

Rosa Louise McCauley Parks (February 4, 1913 – October 24, 2005) was an African-American civil rights activist, whom the U.S. Congress called "the first lady of civil rights" and "the mother of the freedom movement".

On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Parks refused to obey bus driver's order that she give up her seat in the colored section to a white passenger, after the white section was filled.

Parks' act of defiance and the Montgomery Bus Boycott became important symbols of the modern Civil Rights Movement.

She became an international icon of resistance to racial segregation.

She organized and collaborated with civil rights leaders, including Edgar Nixon and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a new minister in town who gained national prominence in the civil rights movement.

Although widely honored in later years, she also suffered for her act; she was fired from her job as a seamstress in a local department store.

From 1965 to 1988 she served as secretary and receptionist to John Conyers, an African-American U.S. Representative.

After retirement, Parks wrote her autobiography, and lived a largely private life in Detroit.

Parks received national recognition and a posthumous statue in the United States Capitol's National Statuary Hall. Upon her death in 2005, she was the first woman and second non-U.S. government official to lie in honor at the Capitol Rotunda.

Below are the curious facts about the life of this hero of a woman.

• Parks had been thrown off the bus a decade earlier by the same bus driver -- for refusing to pay in the front and go around to the back to board. She had avoided that driver's bus for twelve years because she knew well the risks of angering drivers, all of whom were white and carried guns. Her own mother had been threatened with physical violence by a bus driver, in front of Parks who was a child at the time. Parks' neighbor had been killed for his bus stand, and teenage protester Claudette Colvin, among others, had recently been badly manhandled by the police.
• Parks was a lifelong believer in self-defense. Malcolm X was her personal hero. Her family kept a gun in the house, including during the boycott, because of the daily terror of white violence. As a child, when pushed by a white boy, she pushed back. His mother threatened to kill her, but Parks stood her ground. Another time, she held a brick up to a white bully, daring him to follow through on his threat to hit her. He went away. When the Klu Klux Klan went on rampages through her childhood town, Pine Level, Ala., her grandfather would sit on the porch all night with his rifle. Rosa stayed awake some nights, keeping vigil with him.
• Her husband was her political partner. Parks said Raymond was "the first real activist I ever met." Initially she wasn't romantically interested because Raymond was more light-skinned than she preferred, but she became impressed with his boldness and "that he refused to be intimidated by white people." At Raymond's urging, Parks, who had to drop out in the eleventh grade to care for her sick grandmother, returned to high school and got her diploma. Raymond's input was crucial to Parks' political development and their partnership sustained her political work over many decades.
• Many of Parks' ancestors were Indians. She noted this to a friend who was surprised when in private Parks removed her hairpins and revealed thick braids of wavy hair that fell below her waist. Her husband, she said, liked her hair long and she kept it that way for many years after his death, although she never wore it down in public. Aware of the racial politics of hair and appearance, she tucked it away in a series of braids and buns -- maintaining a clear division between her public presentation and private person.
• Parks' arrest had grave consequences for her family's health and economic well-being. After her arrest, Parks was continually threatened, such that her mother talked for hours on the phone to keep the line busy from constant death threats. Parks and her husband lost their jobs after her stand and didn't find full employment for nearly ten years. Even as she made fundraising appearances across the country, Parks and her family were at times nearly destitute. She developed painful stomach ulcers and a heart condition, and suffered from chronic insomnia. Raymond, unnerved by the relentless harassment and death threats, began drinking heavily and suffered two nervous breakdowns. The black press, culminating in JET magazine's July 1960 story on "the bus boycott's forgotten woman," exposed the depth of Parks' financial need, leading civil rights groups to finally provide some assistance.
• Parks was an internationalist. She was an early opponent of the Vietnam War in the early 1960s, a member of The Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and a supporter of the Winter Soldier hearings in Detroit and the Jeannette Rankin Brigade protest in D.C. In the 1980s, she protested apartheid and U.S. complicity, joining a picket outside the South African embassy and opposed U.S. policy in Central America. Eight days after 9/11, she joined other activists in a letter calling on the United States to work with the international community and no retaliation or war.
• Parks was a lifelong activist and a hero to many, including Nelson Mandela. After his release from prison, he told her, "You sustained me while I was in prison all those years."

Civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks receives a round of applause from fellow civil rights leaders and supporters as she walks across the stage at a gathering in front of Montgomery's State Capital, at the end of the Selma to Montgomery march, late March 1965.

Civil rights leader Rosa Parks smiles while people gathered around her applaud at a ceremony held in her honor at the House of the Lord Church, Brooklyn, N.Y., Jan. 22, 1988.

Rosa Parks and Hillary Clinton at the White House in Washington in 1990.

Eighty-five-year-old civil rights activist Rosa Parks, right, presents a copy of her book "Quiet Strength" to Pope John Paul II after a prayer service in the Cathedral Basilica in St. Louis, Jan. 27, 1999.

Civil rights icon Rosa Parks waves to the audience before receiving the Congressional Medal of Honor at a ceremony, Nov. 28, 1999, in Detroit. The Congressional Medal of Honor is the highest honor that the U.S. government con bestow to an individual.