Rosa Parks was born Rosa Louise McCauley in Tuskegee, Alabama on April 2, 1913. She was the granddaughter of former slaves and the daughter of James McCauley, a carpenter, and Leona McCauley, a rural schoolteacher. Upon the separation of her parents at the age of two, she moved to her maternal grandparents' farm in Pine Level, Alabama with her mother and younger brother, Sylvester. Rosa attended the Montgomery Industrial School for Girls, a private school founded by several liberal women from northern states. She then went on to a laboratory school set up by the Alabama State Teachers College for Negros, but was forced to drop out when her grandmother, and later her mother, became ill.
In 1932, Rosa married Raymond Parks, a barber, who had long been active in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. While Rosa worked with the organization's state president, Edgar Daniel Nixon, to mobilize a voter registration drive in Montgomery, Raymond Parks worked to help free the defendants in the famous Scottsboro case, in which nine young black men were accused of raping two white women. An all-white jury convicted the nine boys and sentenced eight of them to death, despite strong evidence of their innocence. All of the Scottsboro boys eventually gained their freedom, but the process took nearly twenty years.

By 1955, the segregated seating policies on public buses had long been a source of resentment within the black community. Black citizens were required to pay