Rosa Parks was born Rosa Louise McCauley in Tuskegee, Alabama to James McCauley, a carpenter, and Leona McCauley, a teacher. At the age of two she moved to her grandparents' farm in Pine Level, Alabama with her mother and younger brother, Sylvester. At the age of 11 she enrolled in the Montgomery Industrial School for Girls, a private school founded by liberal-minded women from the northern United States. The school's philosophy of self-worth was consistent with Leona McCauley's advice to "take advantage of the opportunities, no matter how few they were."

Opportunities were few indeed. "Back then," Mrs. Parks recalled in an interview, "we didn't have any civil rights. It was just a matter of survival, of existing from one day to the next. I remember going to sleep as a girl hearing the Klan ride at night and hearing a lynching and being afraid the house would burn down." In the same interview, she cited her lifelong acquaintance with fear as the reason for her relative fearlessness in deciding to appeal her conviction during the bus boycott. "I didn't have any special fear," she said. "It was more of a relief to know that I wasn't alone.

"The bus incident led to the formation of the Montgomery Improvement Association, led by the young pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The association called for a boycott of the city-owned bus company. The boycott lasted 382 days and brought Mrs. Parks, Dr. King, and their cause to the attention of the world. A Supreme Court Decision struck down the Montgomery ordinance under which Mrs. Parks had been fined, and outlawed racial segregation on public transportation.

Thanks to the Academy of Achievement

Civil Rights Movement in the United States- struggle by black Americans to gain full citizenship rights and achieve racial equality. Individuals and organizations challenged discrimination with a variety of activities, including protest marches, boycotts, and refusal to abide by segregation laws. Many believe that the movement began with the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955 and ended with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, though some argue that it has not ended yet.

Conditions for blacks in Northern states were somewhat better. Segregated facilities were not as common, and blacks were usually free to vote. However, economic discrimination against blacks was intense; the better jobs almost invariably went to whites.

During World War I (1914-1918) blacks in the military were segregated from whites. At home, blacks became increasingly urbanized; hundreds of thousands of Southern blacks migrated northward, seeking jobs in Northern cities. In the North, black communities with a strong political presence developed. In the 1930s black protests against discrimination increased, encouraged by new federal programs designed to insure social welfare.

During World War II (1939-1945) all the armed services moved toward equal treatment of blacks, although none flatly rejected segregation. Hundreds of thousands of blacks left Southern farms for war jobs in Northern and Western cities, where they enjoyed larger incomes. After the war, they used their economic and political influence to support civil rights for Southern blacks. Having fought racism abroad, black veterans returned home with greater determination to win civil rights and were supported by many white Americans. In 1948 President Harry Truman ordered the final desegregation of the armed forces.

In the postwar years, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, led by lawyer Thurgood Marshall, focused on achieving educational equality. In 1954 the U.S. Supreme Court held in Brown v. Board of Education that racially segregated education was unconstitutional. Southern white opposition to the ruling was intense. In 1957 in Little Rock, Arkansas, Governor Orval Faubus defied a federal court order to admit nine black students to Central High School. President Dwight Eisenhower sent federal troops to enforce desegregation. As desegregation progressed, membership increased in the Ku Klux Klan, a white supremacist organization that employed intimidation and violence.

After 1965 the focus of the civil rights movement began to change. Martin Luther King, Jr., focused on poverty and racial inequality in the North. Younger activists criticized his interracial strategy and appeals to moral idealism. In 1968 King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. The main opponent of King's policies was SNCC, led by Stokely Carmichael. Carmichael popularized the term Black Power, a philosophy emphasizing black separatism and influenced by the ideas of Malcolm X. What had been a national consensus for civil rights began to deteriorate. In 1968 the Black Panther Party emerged, advocating violence to achieve its goals.

End of the Civil Rights Movement - For many, the civil rights movement ended with the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. Some argue that the movement is not yet over because the goal of full equality has not been achieved. Racial problems still existed after 1968, and urban poverty among blacks represented a worsening problem. Beginning in the 1970s children were bused outside their school districts to desegregate schools, and new affirmative action programs attempted to address the question of equal opportunity for blacks, other minorities, and women.
Info gathered from encarta

From Plessy v. Ferguson
Kennedy on Meredith v. Fair
Desegregation of Armed Forces
March on Washington
National Civil Rights Museum
On the Front Lines with the Little Rock 9 [The American Experience]
 news sites for articles about Civil Rights Movement
Search for educational products about Civil Rights Movement in the United States 

Teaching Tolerance
Civil Rights and Wrongs
Dr.'s Martin Luther King Jr. and Maya Angelou
World Cultures
World Spiritualism
Civil Rights Movement
Table of Contents
Feedback

The artist who created these beautiful graphics 
is unknown to us, please email with any info

ia arts and music