An American activist in the civil rights movement.

Rosa Parks is best known for her refusal to give up her seat in the Whites only section of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955, as part of the Montgomery bus boycott that year. Parks organized events with the NAACP and many civil rights leaders including Martin Luther King, Jr. She worked for US Representative John Conyers for many years and ultimately received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1996 from President Clinton for her lifelong justice work. When she passed away in 2005, she was the first woman to lay in honor in the Capitol Rotunda.