Rosa Parks
1913 – 2005 · United States
Known for: The mother of the civil rights movement
“You must never be fearful about what you are doing when it is right.”
Biography
On 1 December 1955, a seamstress in Montgomery, Alabama, refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger, and stayed seated while a nation was forced to stand up. Rosa Parks was arrested, and her quiet defiance sparked the 381-day Montgomery Bus Boycott that launched Martin Luther King Jr. and the modern civil rights movement.
"People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired," she wrote, "but that isn't true. The only tired I was, was tired of giving in." She spent the rest of her life in the struggle for justice, and when she died she became the first woman to lie in honour in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda.