"To this day I believe we are here on the planet Earth to live, grow up and do what we can to make this world a better place for all people to enjoy freedom." (Blum. 2002, March). Rosa Parks said this in an interview in March in the year of 2002 and she has truly meant this for the past eighty-nine years she has been alive. She has truly been an influence on the creation of equality between African Americans and all other races. Through her actions in the Montgomery bus boycott (1955-1956) she was able to help bring attention to the wrong that was being done and she was able to give attention to other leaders, like Martin Luther King, Jr., who eventually had a huge influence in the African American history.
Rosa Parks was born on February 4, 1913 in Tuskegee, Alabama. Her mother was a schoolteacher and taught her at home until the age of eleven. After home schooling, she attended Montgomery Industrial School for Girls and then Booker T. Washington High School. These schools were both for African-American students only. The way she was living her life, she became used to obeying the "blacks only" and "whites only" rules of the segregation laws. Although she obeyed them, she found them quite humiliating and very unjust. When Rosa's little brother, Sylvester, was born, her father left them because he was cheated out of his land by a white man. Their father left them and moved to another town and Rosa, her mother, and her brother went to live with their grandparents in Pinelevel, Alabama. The farm land their grandparents owned in Pinelevel was very small, but it kept everyone fed. When Rosa came close to graduating, she dropped out. As stated in the Diversity Folder, in 2000, Rosa was assumed to have dropped out of school in order to obtain a job. She felt as if she needed to help support her family and provide a sense of higher income for them, being that her father had left her family.