Rosa Parks

Rosa Parks (1913–2005) was an American civil rights activist best known for her refusal to give up her bus seat to a white passenger in Montgomery, Alabama, on December 1, 1955, an act that sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott and became a catalyst for the modern Civil Rights Movement. She served as secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP for over a decade prior to her arrest and, after relocating to Detroit in 1957, continued her activism by working for Congressman John Conyers and co-founding the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development in 1987. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal, and upon her death became the first Black American to lie in state at the U.S. Capitol rotunda.