By MICHAEL VIVAR
Rosa Parks is a towering figure in the story of the United States, but many don't know the figure beyond the seat she refused to give up. Here are additional unknown facts to observe and honor her legacy.
Like other Black people in the American South, Rosa Parks' everyday life was that of fraught frustration. Jim Crow laws segregated everything from water fountains to libraries to buses.
Parks valued education and social awareness at an early age. This was instilled in her by her mother, who was a teacher. She attended a laboratory school at Alabama State Teachers’ College for Negroes but dropped out at 16 to care for family.
Parks wasn't sitting in the whites-only section of the bus before her arrest. When a white woman was "forced" to stand, the driver, James Blake, demanded four people vacate seats in the Blacks-only section. Three did. Parks did not.
While Parks' civil disobedience on the bus happened in 1955, she'd been a member of the NAACP since 1943 over the protests of her husband, Raymond. She was an ardent advocate of racial equity.
Parks wasn't the first Black woman to be arrested for not giving up a seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus. Nine months prior, 15-year old Claudette Colvin was arrested for the same "crime." Parks helped raise defense funds for Colvin.
Martin Luther King Jr used Parks' publicized act of civil disobedience as a template for non-violent resistance. Until then, he'd been inspired by Mahatma Gandhi's passive protest but couldn't transpose it to the US.
Weeks after her initial arrest, Parks was jailed a second time as an one of at least 114 other organizers of an ongoing Montgomery bus boycott. She worked as a dispatcher arranging carpool rides.
In 2002, Parks' health was in decline which led to financial troubles. Facing eviction, Hartford Memorial Baptist Church raised money for her back rent. The housing company was shamed into letting her remain in her home for free until her death.
Rosa Parks died on Oct. 27, 2005 of natural causes at the age of 92. She was the first woman and the second Black person to lie in state at the US Capitol Rotunda in Washington, DC.