Rosa Parks.

On February 4, 1913, Rosa Louise McCauley was born in Tuskegee, Alabama. Her father left the family when she was young, and she was raised by her mother and grandparents on a farm. She attended Alabama State College but had to leave to care for her ailing mother. In 1932, she married Raymond Parks, a barber and civil rights activist, which deepened her involvement in the movement.

Parks’s defining act came on December 1, 1955, when she refused to vacate her seat on a Montgomery city bus, leading to her arrest and the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The boycott lasted 381 days and ended with a Supreme Court ruling desegregating buses. Parks later worked as a staff aide for Congressman John Conyers and appeared in the television series Touched by an Angel in 1994. She also received the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series for her cameo.

In 1932, Parks married Raymond Parks, a barber and long-time NAACP member. The couple had no children. After the boycott, they moved to Detroit, Michigan, in 1957 due to death threats and harassment. Parks remained active in civil rights and was friends with Stokely Carmichael, Nikki Giovanni, Marla Gibbs, and Della Reese. She suffered from dementia in her later years and was cared for by a caretaker at the Riverfront Apartments in Detroit.

Parks’s act of defiance became a symbol of the civil rights movement. Time magazine named her one of the 20 most influential figures of the 20th century in 1999. She was the first woman and second African American to lie in repose at the Capitol Rotunda in Washington, D.C. Posthumously, she received the Congressional Gold Medal in 1999 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1996. An elementary school in Cambridge, Massachusetts bears her name, and an asteroid was named 284996 Rosaparks in 2010. She is remembered as the mother of the civil rights movement.