Rosa Parks

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks declined to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama city bus — and the mythology that immediately grew around her got nearly everything wrong. Parks was not simply tired from a long day's work. She was not a random seamstress who acted on spontaneous impulse. She was a trained civil rights activist, secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP, who had already been removed from a Montgomery bus once before. Her arrest was a deliberate act, partly a test case the NAACP had been preparing to mount.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott that followed lasted 381 days. Black residents — who made up the majority of the city's bus riders — walked, carpooled, and organized until the Supreme Court ruled in November 1956 that Alabama's bus segregation laws violated the Constitution. The boycott elevated a 26-year-old Baptist minister named Martin Luther King Jr. to national prominence and proved that disciplined nonviolent economic pressure could crack the legal infrastructure of segregation — a template activists would apply across the South for the next decade.

Parks spent most of her post-boycott life in Detroit, working on the staff of congressman John Conyers from 1965 until she retired in 1988. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1996 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 1999. When she died in October 2005, her casket lay in honor in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol — the first woman in American history accorded that distinction.