Rosa Parks (1913 - 2005), was an American civil rights activist whose refusal to relinquish her seat on a public bus precipitated the 1955–56 Montgomery bus boycott in Alabama, which became the spark that ignited the civil rights movement in the United States.
For her role in igniting the successful campaign, Parks became known as the “mother of the civil rights movement.”
Though achieving the desegregation of Montgomery’s city buses was an incredible feat, Parks was not satisfied with that victory. She saw that the United States was still failing to respect and protect the lives of Black Americans. Martin Luther King, Jr., who had been brought to national attention by his organization of ...