When she was a baby, Parks moved from Tuskegee to live with her father’s family in Abbeville. When Parks and her parents arrived, the house became too crowded, and Parks’s father was seldom home because of the itinerant nature of his job. As a result, Parks’s mother left Abbeville with her, and the two relocated to Pine Level to live with Parks’s mother’s family. In Pine Level, Parks attended the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church, a century-old independent Black denomination founded by free Blacks in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in the early nineteenth century. Baptized at age two, she remained a member of the church throughout her life. Her mother worked as a teacher in the nearby community of Spring Hill, where she lived during the week. While her mother was away, Parks lived with her grandparents on their family farm, where they grew fruit, pecan, and walnut trees and raised chickens and cows. At the age of six or seven, she began working on the plantation of Moses Hudson, who paid Black children 50 cents a day to pick cotton. Parks also learned quilting and sewing from her mother, completing her first quilt at the age of 10 and her first dress at 11.

Growing up in Alabama, Parks faced a society characterized by racial segregation and violence. Alabama and other southern states began implementing segregationist policies during the 1870s and 1880s, shortly after the end of the Civil War in 1865, culminating in a 1901 state constitutional convention that formally codified Jim Crow segregation into law. This system enforced racial separation in nearly all aspects of life, including financial institutions, healthcare, religious facilities, burial grounds, and public transportation. Acts of racist violence were also widespread, with the Ku Klux Klan intensifying its activity in Pine Level and across the United States after the end of World War I. Parks later recalled that she “heard of a lot of black people being found dead” under mysterious circumstances during her childhood.

Parks initially attended a one-room schoolhouse at the local Mount Zion AME Zion church. When she was eleven or twelve, she began attending the Montgomery Industrial School for Girls, where she received vocational training. After the school closed in 1928, she transferred to Booker T. Washington Junior High School, a segregated public school. She then attended a laboratory school set up by the Alabama State Teachers College for Negroes, but dropped out to care for her ailing grandmother and mother.

After leaving school, Parks worked on her family’s farm and as a domestic worker in white households. Black women in Alabama who worked as domestic workers often experienced sexual violence. During the 1950s or ’60s, Parks wrote an account of an incident where a white man named “Mr. Charlie” tried to sexually assault her. In her account, she claims that she verbally resisted Mr. Charlie’s advances and denounced his racism. The account concludes with her trying to ignore him while reading a newspaper. Though the account may have been partially or entirely fictionalized, biographer Jeanne Theoharis notes that many of the elements of the account “correspond to Parks’s life”, speculating that Parks “wrote [the account] as an allegory to suggest larger themes of domination and resistance”, or that, “given that more than twenty-five years had passed before she wrote [the account] down, she augmented what she said to Charlie that evening with all the points that she had wished to make as she resisted his advances”.

In 1931, when she was 18, Rosa was introduced to her future husband, Raymond Parks, by a mutual friend. He was 28. She was initially “[not] very interested in him” because of “some unhappy romantic experiences”[a] and because of his light skin. Raymond eventually persuaded Parks to ride with him in his car. At the time, automobile ownership was rare among Black men in Alabama. Parks described Raymond as the “first real activist” she had met, admiring his opposition to racial prejudice. The two married on December 18, 1932, at Rosa’s mother’s house. Soon after, they moved to a rooming house in the Centennial Hill neighborhood of Montgomery.