Rosa Parks Birthday: 5 Facts You Didn't Know About Activist

Civil rights icon Rosa Parks was born in 1913 on this day, Feb. 4. Remembered most for refusing to give up her seat to a white person on a public bus in Montgomery, Ala., in 1955, the pioneer has a long record as an influential figure.

Raised in the segregated south and coming of age as the civil rights movement gained traction in the 1950s, her refusal to sit give up her seat and subsequent arrest eventually led to a Supreme Court case supporting her plea by citing the equal rights clauses outlined in the 14th Amendment of the Constitution.

But that’s not the only thing Rosa Parks did. Here are five things you might not know about the civil rights leader:

1. The Picture

An arrest photo of her holding her mug shot number, 7053, is widely said to have followed her arrest for violating seating protocols. The mug shot, however, is actually from 1956 when she was arrested during a protest movement in Montgomery that followed her initial arrest.

The so-called Montgomery bus boycott lasted from her initial arrest in 1955 to Dec. 1956, when the Supreme Court ruled Alabama’s segregation laws were unconstitutional in Browder v. Gale.

2. Scottsboro Boys

In 1932, Rosa McCauley married Raymond Parks, a member of the NAACP who would later become its secretary. The couple teamed up the previous year to help with the defense of the so-called Scottsboro Boys, nine Black teenagers falsely accused of raping two white women.

All nine were originally convicted by an all-white jury, with death sentences handed down for many of the suspects. The case eventually made its way on appeal to the Supreme Court, which ordered a retrial with more diversity.

3. John Conyers

Moving to Detroit in the 1960s after struggling to find work in Alabama, Parks was hired by then-freshman Rep. John Conyers in 1958 to serve as a secretary in his Detroit office. That’s a position she held until 1988.

Retiring two years before his death in 2017, Conyers was the longest-serving Black man to ever hold a congressional seat and is widely heralded as a civil rights icon himself.

4. Helping Students

Losing her husband to cancer in the late 70s, Parks, with no living members of her immediate family, returned to work on civil rights issues from Detroit in earnest. She co-founded a scholarship foundation that bears her name to support college-bound high schoolers and helped establish an institute organizing bus tours of Underground Railroads sites across the country.

5. So Many Streets

Made famous in the Clint Eastwood film “Gran Torino,” Detroit’s Highland Park suburb has been traversed by Rosa Parks Boulevard since the 1970s. After a naming in Ohio, Columbus Alive estimated there were around 700 streets named after Rosa Parks across the country.

The civil rights movements that caught global traction last year prompted an interest overseas. Streets in the United Kingdom now have names like Rosa Parks Street and George Floyd Street, after the Minneapolis man who died after a white policeman knelt on his neck for nearly 9 minutes.

Rosa Parks died of natural causes in her Detroit apartment in 2005 at the age of 92. She was the first black woman ever to lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda in Washington D.C.