Rosa Louise McCauley is born Feb. 4 in Tuskegee, Ala., to James McCauley, a carpenter, and Leona McCauley, a teacher.
She attends Booker T. Washington High School for ninth grade, but drops out when her mother becomes seriously ill. For 10th and 11th grades, she attends Alabama State Teachers College for Negroes.
Marries Raymond Parks, a barber, at 19.
Receives her high school diploma with the encouragement of her husband.
She refuses to give up her seat and is ejected from a bus. This was 12 years before her historic stand. She tries to register to vote and is denied. She becomes secretary of the Montgomery NAACP.
Finally receives certificate for voting after three attempts.
On Dec. 1, she refuses to give up her seat to a white man on a racially segregated bus. She is arrested, fingerprinted, jailed by police and fined $14. She stands trial and on Dec. 5 is found guilty of breaking the segregation laws. The Montgomery bus boycott begins and will last 381 days. The boycott brings the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to national prominence as president of the Montgomery Improvement Association.
She, her husband and mother move to Detroit where she works as a seamstress.
Her husband, Raymond Parks, 74, dies of cancer.
The Detroit News and Detroit Public Schools establish the Rosa Parks Scholarship Foundation, honoring the 25th anniversary of her stand in Montgomery.
She founds the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development, which offers guidance to young blacks.
She retires from John Conyers' office.
Publishes her first book, "Rosa Parks My Story," (New York Dial Books) with Jim Haskins.
She is assaulted and robbed of $53 in the home she rents in Detroit. She then moves to the Riverfront Apartments. Her assailant is arrested and convicted.
Speaks at the Million Man March in Washington. 1998. She is hospitalized after a fall in her Riverfront apartment. The Rosa Parks Learning Center opens at Botsford Commons.
President Clinton awards her the Congressional Gold Medal of Honor, the highest honor a civilian can receive in the United States.
The Rosa Parks Museum and Library opens in Montgomery, Ala., on the corner where she refused to give up her bus seat in 1955.
Rosa Parks dies on Oct. 24 in her Detroit home.