Rosa Louise Parks was an American civil rights activist whose refusal to surrender her bus seat to a white passenger in Montgomery, Alabama, on 1 December 1955 became a defining event in the struggle against racial segregation. Her arrest helped prompt the Montgomery Bus Boycott, a sustained protest that contributed to a court ruling ending segregation on the city’s buses.

Parks had already spent years working for racial equality. She joined the Montgomery branch of the NAACP in 1943 and served as its secretary, working on voter registration and cases involving discrimination and violence. After moving to Detroit in 1957, she remained active in civil rights campaigns and worked for Congressman John Conyers from 1965 to 1988.

Parks received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1996 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 1999. After her death in 2005, she became the first woman to lie in honour in the United States Capitol Rotunda.