Rosa Parks
Rosa Louise McCauley Parks was born in Tuskegee, Alabama and raised by her mother and grandparents. Far from a quiet seamstress who was simply tired, Parks was a trained activist who had served as secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP for over a decade.
On December 1, 1955, she refused to surrender her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery city bus. Her arrest triggered the Montgomery Bus Boycott — a 381-day protest led by a young Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that resulted in the Supreme Court ruling bus segregation unconstitutional.
Parks spent the rest of her life as an activist, co-founding the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development in 1987. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Congressional Gold Medal, and upon her death in 2005, became the first woman to lie in honor in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda.
"I have learned over the years that when one's mind is made up, this diminishes fear."— Rosa Parks
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