Read the excerpt from "Freedom Walkers” by Russell Freedman.Against great odds, Parks earned a high school diploma. At the time, Montgomery had no public high school for blacks. Rosa’s family, ambitious for her advancement, arranged to send her to the laboratory school at Alabama State College, which trained black teachers. Rosa cleaned classrooms to help pay her way through school. After starting the eleventh grade, she had to drop out to care for her ailing grandmother, but she managed to return to school after she married. Rosa received her diploma when she was twenty years old, becoming one of a small number of black high school graduates in the city at that time.