![]() Nixon was a railroad porter known in the city as an advocate for Black people who wanted to register to vote, and also as president of the local branch of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters union. She worked closely with chapter president Edgar Daniel (E.D.) Nixon. Co-existing with white people in a city governed by “ Jim Crow” (segregation) laws, however, was fraught with daily frustrations: Black people could attend only certain (inferior) schools, could drink only from specified water fountains and could borrow books only from the “Black” library, among other restrictions.Īlthough Raymond had previously discouraged her out of fear for her safety, in December 1943, Rosa also joined the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP and became chapter secretary. Raymond and Rosa, who worked as a seamstress, became respected members of Montgomery’s large African American community. He supported Rosa in her efforts to earn her high-school diploma, which she ultimately did the following year. In 1932, at 19, she married Raymond Parks, a self-educated man 10 years her senior who worked as a barber and was a long-time member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ( NAACP). She left at 16, early in 11th grade, because she needed to care for her dying grandmother and, shortly thereafter, her chronically ill mother. ![]() Rosa moved to Montgomery, Alabama, at age 11 and eventually attended high school there, a laboratory school at the Alabama State Teachers’ College for Negroes. Rosa’s mother was a teacher, and the family valued education. She stood her ground until Blake pulled her coat sleeve, enraged, to demand her cooperation. Parks stepped onto his very crowded bus on a chilly day 12 years earlier, paid her fare at the front, then resisted the rule in place for Black people to disembark and re-enter through the back door. Her brother, Sylvester, was born in 1915, and shortly after that her parents separated.ĭid you know? When Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat in 1955, it wasn’t the first time she’d clashed with driver James Blake. She moved with her parents, James and Leona McCauley, to Pine Level, Alabama, at age 2 to reside with Leona’s parents. Rosa Louise McCauley was born in Tuskegee, Alabama, on February 4, 1913.
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