For anyone who doesn't recognize her name, she's the black woman from Alabama who was arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man in 1955. After her arrest, a young man named Martin Luther King Jr. spearheaded a boycott of the Alabama transit system, until the Supreme Court desecregated the transit system about a year later and triggered the Civil Rights Movement
In some ways, it sounds like this must have happened 200 years ago. Was it really only 50 years ago that whites and blacks were segregated like this?? I remember my father telling me of a trip he took to Georgia in the early 1950s (with his parents). They got on a bus in Atlanta and my grandparents took the last two seats at the front of the bus. My father spotted several empty seats at the back of the bus so he made his way back there and sat down. Being from Canada, he only had a vague idea as to what segregation in the South was all about and never thought anything of it, until the bus driver called him up to the front and told him that the "back is for the n**gers and the front is for the whites." When my father told him that there were no seats at the front, the bus driver told him that he'd have to stand. My father thought that was absurd but he was only a teenager at the time and fearful of what might happen if he went and sat at the back again. So there he stood while there was all kinds of seats available at the back!
I give Rosa Park great credit for what she did, although I'm sure she never could have guessed the impact her decision that day would lead to.