Rosa Parks
Rosa Parks was an American civil rights activist whose refusal to give up her bus seat to a white passenger in 1955 sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott and became a defining moment of the U.S. civil rights movement.
On December 1, 1955, Parks, then working as a seamstress, was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, for refusing to give up her seat on a segregated bus, violating local segregation laws. Her arrest was not spontaneous protest alone; Parks was already active in the local NAACP chapter.
Her arrest triggered the 381-day Montgomery Bus Boycott, organized in part by a young minister named Martin Luther King Jr., which ended with a Supreme Court ruling that bus segregation was unconstitutional.
Parks continued civil rights work for the rest of her life and became known as 'the mother of the civil rights movement.' She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1996 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 1999.