white riders But one white man was left standing That’s when the bus driver James F Blake looked back He told Parks and three other black people sitting near her to give up their seats African Americans were expected to stand so that white people could sit The others rose They moved to the back of the bus Most days Parks agreed to move too But she’d had enough of giving in to unfair segregation laws She remained seated Blake asked Parks if she was planning to stand up She simply said No He said he would have Parks arrested She replied You may do that Blake left the bus and came back with two police officers They hauled Parks off to City Hall She was fingerprinted photographed and charged Then she was placed in a prison cell Parks took a stand by staying seated on that bus That small act changed the course of her life and the lives of many others forever She showed people that it wasn’t okay to treat black people differently People across the city and even the entire country took
notice Parks quickly became one of the best-known faces of the American civil rights movement History of Inequality The American civil rights movement took place from the mid-1950s to the late 1960s African Americans did not have the same civil rights and freedoms as white people In the southern states oppression and segregation were common since the American Civil War 1861 1865 and the end of slavery Over time black people began to take action They hoped to gain fair and equal treatment for all people In the 1930s the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People NAACP FOR CIVIL RIGHTS The NAACP is a civil rights group that formed in 1909 in Springfield Illinois It tries to make the world a fair and equal place for all people no matter their race The NAACP holds events to help spread the word about why civil rights matter Today the NAACP has more than 500,000 members around the world
The NAACP used lawyers including Thurgood Marshall to fight segregation in the courts NAACP began working to remove segregation from society Growing Up Rosa Parks was born Rosa Louise McCauley in Tuskegee Alabama on February 4 1913 When Rosa was two
years old her parents separated She moved to Pine Level Alabama with her mother and younger brother Sylvester They lived on a farm with her grandparents who had formerly been enslaved Rosa went to the local African American school It RECY TAYLOR In 1944 a group of white men assaulted Recy Taylor The police arrested no one though they knew who the men were So the NAACP sent Parks one of their investigators The sheriff threatened Parks as she interviewed Taylor Parks exposed the case in newspapers Despite her hard work and public outrage two juries refused to charge the men was a one-room schoolhouse that the black community built themselves It did not have enough supplies for all of the students Rosa walked to school every day while white children rode the bus to a nice new school Rosa had to leave school in her junior year to care for her sick grandmother She planned to return to get her high school diploma but then her mother
