Rosa Parks

Rosa Parks grew up in rural Alabama, where her grandfather sometimes sat on the porch at night with a shotgun in case the Ku Klux Klan came. She had to leave school to care for her grandmother and mother, and finished her high school diploma at 20, at a time when fewer than one in ten Black Americans in the state had one.

She joined the Montgomery branch of the NAACP in 1943 and became its secretary, investigating cases of racial violence and trying, repeatedly, to register to vote. In the summer of 1955 she attended a training school for activists in Tennessee. She was not a passive figure who stumbled into history.

On 1 December 1955 she was riding home from her job as a seamstress when the driver ordered her and three others to give up their seats for a white passenger. The others moved. She did not. "I was not tired physically," she later wrote. "The only tired I was, was tired of giving in." She was arrested and fined.

Montgomery's Black community organised a boycott of the buses that lasted 381 days and was led by a 26-year-old minister, Martin Luther King Jr. It ended when the Supreme Court ruled bus segregation unconstitutional. Parks lost her job and received death threats, and moved to Detroit, where she worked for a congressman for over 20 years. When she died in 2005 she became the first woman to lie in honour in the US Capitol.