Rosa Parks and Her Life After the Alabama Bus Boycott

We all know that Rosa Parks’s actions on December 1, 1955 helped to spur the Civil Rights movement that ended legal racial segregation in the south and propelled Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. into the forefront of the movement. While she was honored by many for the rest of her life, she continued to struggle against racism and other life trials for the rest of her life.

Although Parks was not the first person to suffer arrest in Montgomery Alabama for defying bus segregation rules, she was the ideal person for the NAACP to represent, as she was a stellar member of the community. She was married, employed, politically savvy, and had a dignified demeanor. The NAACP rallied around her and initiated a bus boycott and later civil action suit (which other black in similar situations, but not Mrs. Parks). Browder V. Gayle was successful in part to Brown V. Board of Education from two years earlier, and racial segregation on buses was deemed unconstitutional.

After the arrest, Rosa Parks suffered many hardships as an icon of the Civil Rights Movement. She was fired from her department store job and her husband quit his job as his boss forbade him to speak about his wife or her case. Rosa and Raymond Parks moved to Hampton Virginia to find work and also because they were unhappy with Civil Rights leaders. She later moved to Detroit with her husband and mother where she worked as a seamstress until 1965. At this time, she was hired as the secretary for John Conyers, an African American U.S. Congress Representative. She retired from this job in 1988. She later volunteered as a member of the Board of Planned Parenthood. She published a biography in 1992 and a Memoir in 1995.

In her latter years Rosa Parks ��”šï¿½ï¿½”worried that young blacks had absolutely no sense and appreciation of the titanic battles that she and the civil rights leaders waged to make America live up to its much-betrayed promise of justice and equality. In a reflective interview many years after the bus boycott, she did not absolve herself and other blacks of her generation of blame for failing to pass on the torch.��”šï¿½ï¿½ (AlterNet.org) On August 30, 1994, a drug addict attacked her in her home. Although he recognized her, he still demanded money and punched her in the face before leaving her home. She brought up several lawsuits against hip-hop OutKast artists who used her name without permission in ways that she found demeaning. Her family claimed that she was being taken advantage of by her caretakers where filing the lawsuits to get money as they felt she was in a state of dementia.

Rosa Parks died on October 24, 2005, at the age of 92. She received many awards after her death and in her later years. She was widowed and had no children. She was buried between her husband and mother where she had previously had her own headstone prepared and placed.