70 years ago today, the seamstress Rosa Parks refused to obey an order from a bus driver to give up her seat to a white man and was arrested for violating Montgomery, Alabama’s racial segregation laws. Although Parks was not the first person to ‘stand up’ in order to stay seated on a bus, her act of defiance sparked a yearlong city bus boycott that galvanized the Civil Rights Movement. READ more… (1955)

At the time, Parks was secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP and had been trained as an activist. But, on this day, she acted as a private citizen who was simply “tired of giving in”. She became an international icon of resistance to racial segregation and organized and collaborated with civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King, Jr., a new minister in town.

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