Born on February 4 1913, Rosa Parks was the daughter of James McCauley and Leona Edwards. McCauley, a carpenter, and Edwards, a schoolteacher, named Rosa after her maternal grandmother. McCauley was mostly a builder. Rosa was a sickly child and small for her age. It was hard for her mother to take care of her because her father was absent much of the time. They lived as a family in Pine Level, Alabama until Rosa was two and a half years old and she did not even see him again until she was 5 years old and her brother was three years old. He came back but he left and she did not even see him until she was a married adult. She was a fatherless child most of her life. It changed her life completely to grow up with no kind of father around to guide her. Rosa had brother named Sylvester and as they grew up with each other she became very protective over her brother. She let anybody brother or mess with him. She never did get out of that attitude of trying to be protective of him. " One day when I was about ten, I met a little white boy named Franklin on the road. He was about my size, maybe a little bit larger. He said something to me, and he threatened to hit me-balled his fist up as if to go give me a sock. I picked up a brick and dared him to hit me. He thought better of the idea and went away." At that early age, she did not suppose to retaliate on white people even if they did something to you. She knew at the age of ten that she had much in her rights to defend herself just like the whites.Rosa was too aggressive for her age of time. Rosa start to attend school and she was a very bright girl but she realized that the white schools was in better conditions than the black schools. "Rosa first school was a small shack, and the students had few textbooks." She learned that the white schools were federal funded and the blacks was build and heated without the help of the town or state or country. Rosa slowly began to believe that black people are not free. When she moved to Montgomery, Alabama, she realized how segregated blacks and whites are. Blacks and whites could not stay in the same hotels, use the different bathroom, have different water fountains, eat different restaurants, and sit different in bus transportation. She could not believe how separate as a people we were. She meets her husband Raymond Parks and married him in December of 1932 in Pine Level in Rosa mother's home. She received her high school diploma in 1933 when she was twenty years old. Raymond Parks was the very first activist she ever came across. Raymond Parks was a long-time member of NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Parks got involved in voter registration because he was not satisfied with the few blacks that were voting. So Rosa first year to try to vote was 1943 and was denied another two times but finally on her fourth try she passed and got her certificate in the mail.Rosa was a registered voter but the second time when she tried to...
