Rosa Parks, or Rosa Louise McCauley, (born February 4, 1913, U.S.—died October 24, 2005, Detroit, Michigan), was an American civil rights activist. Her refusal to give up her seat in a public bus precipitated the 1955–56 Montgomery bus boycott in Alabama, which became the spark that ignited the civil rights movement in the United States.

  Rosa Louise McCauley was born in Tuskegee, Alabama, U.S.A. to parents James McCauley, a competent stonemason and carpenter and Leona Edwards McCauley, a teacher. She spent most of her infancy and youth unwell with recurrent tonsillitis. Her parents divorced when she was two years old, shortly after the birth of her younger brother, Sylvester. From then on, the children were estranged from their father and relocated with their mother to their maternal grandparents' farm in Pine Level, Alabama, just outside Montgomery. The children's great-grandfather, a former indentured servant, also resided there until....