📍Cleveland Court, Montgomery, AL 36108, USA
1951 – 1957“I grew up on my grandparents' farm in Pine Level, a small country community in southern Alabama, where my grandfather, who had been born into slavery, would sit up at night with his shotgun across his knees when the Ku Klux Klan rode by. From him and my mother, a teacher, I learned that I had a right to be treated with dignity. Raymond Parks and I married in 1932, and by the early 1950s we were living in a small apartment in the Cleveland Courts public housing project in Montgomery. I worked as a seamstress at the Montgomery Fair department store downtown and served as secretary of the local NAACP, recording cases of violence and injustice against Black people across Alabama. Every day I rode the Cleveland Avenue bus home. On the evening of 1 December 1955, tired of giving in, I would not give up my seat to a white passenger. The year-long boycott that followed changed America, but Raymond and I both lost our jobs and faced constant threats, and in 1957 we left Montgomery for Detroit.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today