Rosa Parks
Rosa Parks was born in 1913, in Tuskegee, Alabama. In the South, black and white people used to be segregated. They were not equal and didn't have the same rights. They couldn't go to school together or drink out of the same water fountains or even eat in the same restaurants. Black people had to sit in the back of the bus in certain rows, or if a white person wanted their seat because the bus was crowded, they had to stand up. Rosa Parks is a African American woman who refused to give up her seat to a white person on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955. It helped to start the modern civil rights movement in the United States.
She was arrested for violating a city ordinance and it started a year long boycott of the Montgomery bus sytem as protest. The black people didn't ride the buses. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called for an end to segregation on buses. The boycott was successful. Rosa Parks lost her job and moved to Detroit in 1957 and in 1967 she began working for John Conyers, Jr., a Democratic member of the US House of Representatives.
She is sometimes called the Mother of the Modern Civil Rights Movement. She was a courageous person because she kept her beliefs even though she knew something bad could happen to her.