Rosa Parks Day Date in the current year: February 4, 2024

Rosa Parks was a seamstress by profession, but she also worked as a secretary for the Montgomery chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). As a NAACP member, she helped to investigate cases of sexual assault, including the notorious gang rape of Recy Taylor in 1945.

On December 1, 1955, Parks was riding a city bus, sitting in the frontmost row for black people. There were no vacant places in the section of the bus reserved for white passengers, so when a Caucasian man boarded the bus, the bus driver told everyone in Parks’s row to move back. She refused and was arrested and fined for failing to obey the driver’s seat assignments.

The arrest of Rosa Parks led to the so-called Montgomery Bus Boycott. For 1 year and 15 days, African American residents of Montgomery boycotted the city’s public transportation system as a form of protest against the policy of racial segregation. The boycott ended on December 20, 1956, when the United States Supreme Court declared the state laws that segregated buses unconstitutional.

Rosa Parks Day was first celebrated in California on February 4, 2000 (Parks’s birthday). In 2015, February 4 was officially proclaimed as Rosa Parks Day in Missouri. In Ohio and Oregon, however, the holiday is observed on December 1, the anniversary of Parks’s arrest.