Increased appreciation, plus countless honors and awards, finally began to come Parks' way. Television documentaries such as "Eyes on the Prize" brought little-known activists into the public eye. Then journalists and historians, starting with Howell Raines' "My Soul Is Rested" in 1977, began to delve thoroughly into the movement's history. A few magazine articles highlighted her quietly courageous role, but Parks herself did not pursue the limelight. hired Parks as a receptionist in his Detroit office, a job she held until her retirement in 1988.Īll through the 1960s and into the 1970s, Parks remained a largely forgotten figure. A close friend described Parks as "really quite bitter," and in 1957 she moved first to Virginia and then to Detroit, where she resumed work as a seamstress.
Rivalries within the Montgomery Improvement Assn., the black community group set up to pursue the boycott, blocked her from joining its staff. But she lived almost a quarter of a century in near-obscurity before history finally appreciated and acknowledged the importance of her solitary act of quiet resistance.Īfter her arrest, she was fired from her job as a department store seamstress and could not get another.
Nowadays, Parks' life is widely celebrated. A decade later, those demonstrations culminated in the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Her refusal to give up her seat on a city bus in Montgomery, Ala., in 1955 initiated a successful yearlong bus boycott that marked the onset of Southern direct-action protests. civil rights movement's most famous heroine. Rosa Parks, who died Monday at 92, was the U.S.
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