Black History Month: Rosa Parks

Arguably the most high-profile, female, civil rights figure in American history, Alabama secretary Rosa Parks would come to embody the righteous defiance of southern blacks on December 1, 1955, when she refused a Montgomery bus driver’s demand that she relinquish her seat to a white passenger.

The much-publicized act of disobedience triggered the year-long Montgomery bus boycott, which would ultimately lead the Supreme Court to declare the city’s bus segregation laws unconstitutional. Common myth portrays Parks as a naïve victim of racial discrimination, when in fact she had been an activist in the civil rights movement for more than a decade — and she would remain so for the rest of her life.