Rosa Parks

Rosa Parks (1913-2005) was an African-American civil rights activist whose act of defiance against segregation became a famous milestone for the civil rights movement.

Parks became a member of the NAACP in 1943, initially working as a secretary for the Montgomery chapter of the organization. Thus, she was already a civil rights activist years before the event that made her famous. 

In December 1955, Parks refused to give up her seat in the bus to a white person after the seats specifically allocated to white people were filled. By her own account, part of her motivation to resist was the thought of Emmett Till, a young African American who had been murdered a few months before, and whose white killers avoided punishment because of a racist justice system. 

Parks was arrested for civil ...