Person · 1913–2005
Rosa Parks
Far more than "the woman who would not give up her seat" — a lifelong organizer whose 1955 arrest sparked the Montgomery bus boycott.
A catalyst of the [[civil-rights-movement]].
Rosa Parks ignited a movement with a single, quiet act of refusal that reverberated across the entire country. Born on February 4, 1913, in Tuskegee, Alabama, Parks had long been active in the NAACP as a secretary and civil rights organizer before the pivotal evening of December 1, 1955, when she refused to surrender her bus seat to a white passenger in Montgomery, Alabama, and was arrested. Her arrest catalyzed the Montgomery Bus Boycott, a 381-day campaign coordinated by a young Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. that ended in December 1956 when the Supreme Court affirmed that segregated bus seating was unconstitutional. Parks was not acting on impulse — she was a seasoned activist whose deliberate courage gave the movement a human face the nation could not ignore. She later attended the March on Washington and witnessed the signing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Honored with both the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal, Parks died on October 24, 2005, in Detroit, rightly remembered as the "Mother of the Civil Rights Movement."