Rosa Parks Day 2026 is on Tuesday

About Rosa Parks Day

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a 42-year-old seamstress and secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP, was arrested for refusing a bus driver's order to give up her seat under the city's segregation law. Her arrest prompted Black residents of Montgomery to boycott the city buses. The boycott lasted 381 days and brought a 26-year-old minister, Martin Luther King Jr., to national attention. In Browder v. Gayle, a federal court ruled in June 1956 that segregated buses were unconstitutional, and the Supreme Court upheld the ruling that November.

Rosa Louise McCauley was born in Tuskegee, Alabama, on February 4, 1913. She and her husband, Raymond Parks, moved to Michigan in 1957, and she lived in Detroit for the rest of her life, continuing her civil rights work. Congress awarded her a Congressional Gold Medal in 1999. After she died on October 24, 2005, her body lay in honor in the Rotunda of the US Capitol, and in 2013 a statue of her was unveiled in National Statuary Hall.

There is no single national Rosa Parks Day, and states have chosen different dates. California's legislature created a Rosa Parks Day on February 4, her birthday, first observed in 2000. Missouri law, added in 2006, has the governor proclaim February 4 as Rosa Parks Day each year. Ohio designated December 1, the anniversary of her arrest; Representative Joyce Beatty, who championed the measure as a state legislator, says Ohio was the first state to recognize that date. In February 2025 Beatty and Alabama Representatives Terri Sewell and Shomari Figures introduced the Rosa Parks Day Act, which would make December 1 a federal holiday.

Transit agencies, schools, libraries and museums use one date or the other to retell her story and the history of the boycott.

Sources: National Archives: An Act of Courage, the Arrest Records of Rosa Parks, Architect of the Capitol: Rosa Parks Statue, Ohio Revised Code 5.2231: Rosa Parks Day, Missouri House of Representatives: HB 1256 (2006), truly agreed summary, SFMTA: Commemorating Rosa Parks Day (2020), Rep. Joyce Beatty: Rosa Parks Day Act introduced (2025). How we check dates.

How to mark Rosa Parks Day

• Read Rosa Parks's own account of her life and activism, such as her autobiography Rosa Parks: My Story, rather than relying only on the short version of the bus story.
• Look at her arrest record and the Browder v. Gayle case files in the National Archives' online teaching materials.
• Plan a visit to the Rosa Parks Museum in Montgomery or to the bus she rode, which is displayed at the Henry Ford museum in Dearborn, Michigan.
• Talk with children or students about the year-long organizing behind the Montgomery bus boycott, including car pools and church meetings.
• Support a local civil rights history project, oral history program or voting rights organization.

Rosa Parks Day dates