Rosa Louise McCauley Parks (1913–2005) was an American civil rights activist whose refusal to surrender her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus in 1955 helped spark the Montgomery bus boycott and became a defining moment of the American civil rights movement.
Connection to education
Parks’ activism was shaped by popular education. She attended the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee in the summer of 1955, shortly before the Montgomery bus boycott. At Highlander — founded by Myles Horton and Don West — Parks participated in workshops on desegregation strategy, racial justice, and community organizing in a racially integrated educational setting in the Jim Crow South.
Parks’ story illustrates a central claim of popular education: that transformative action grows from educational experiences rooted in participants’ own conditions and directed toward collective change. Her decision in Montgomery was not spontaneous but emerged from sustained engagement with community organizing and education for action.
Related
- popular education — the tradition in which Parks was educated at Highlander
- Myles Horton — co-founder of Highlander Folk School
- Septima Clark — civil rights educator who also worked through Highlander
- freedom school — community-organized education in the Black radical tradition