Rosa Parks (1913–2005)
Rosa Parks was, until 1955, an ordinary woman living and working in Montgomery, Alabama, at that time one of the most extensively discriminatory areas in the USA.
Her refusal to give up her seat on a bus so that a white man could sit down – as was the law at the time – led to her arrest, which catalysed a bus boycott by Black people across the USA that lasted over a year (381 days) until the law was repealed.
Thereafter, Parks became an important figure in the Civil Rights movement, and is credited as being one of the foremost influences on the work of Martin Luther King.
