Rosa Parks in Her Own Words

In July 1998 Rosa Parks traveled to Halifax, Nova Scotia, to oversee the Pathways to Freedom bus tour. While in Halifax, Rosa received an honorary degree from Mount Saint Vincent University at a special convocation held in her honor.

Rosa Parks’s principled defiance established her as an international symbol of human dignity and freedom.

The Southern Christian Leadership Conference invited Rosa Parks to participate in the 1963 March on Washington.

In August 1957 Raymond and Rosa Parks and Rosa’s mother, Leona McCauley, moved to Detroit, Michigan, where her younger brother, Sylvester, lived.

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, for disorderly conduct for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man.

When Rosa Parks was arrested on December 1, 1955, for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man, she was mentally prepared for the moment.

Rosa Louise McCauley was born and reared in Alabama during the Jim Crow era, when state laws mandated the separation of the races in practically all aspects of everyday life.

Rosa Parks: In Her Own Words is located on the second floor of the Thomas Jefferson Building in the South Exhibition Gallery.

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