Rosa Parks, an African American woman who made history

In 1955, Rosa Parks was 42 years old. An African American woman, born in Montgomery, Alabama, and the daughter of a carpenter and a school teacher, she was a seamstress by trade and also worked as a secretary and assistant at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

In those years, Black people in the United States—especially in the South—suffered the humiliation of not being able to share the same public spaces as white people: schools, restaurants, waiting rooms. Segregation was so pervasive that restrooms displayed signs reading “Whites Only” or “No Blacks.” The Jim Crow laws, inherited from 19th-century slavery, were designed to make African Americans feel inferior and thus keep them marginalized from society.

On December 1, 1955, Parks boarded a public bus to go home. At that time, the buses were marked with a line: whites in the front and blacks in the back. She sat in the middle section, which blacks could use if no whites needed it. When that section filled up, the driver ordered her, along with three other black people, to give up their seats to a young white man who had just boarded. The others stood up, but she remained motionless.

“The more we obeyed, the worse they treated us,” Parks says in her memoirs. “That day I was fatigued and tired. Fed up with giving in.” Rosa spent the night in jail, accused of disturbing the peace, and paid a fourteen-dollar fine.

The case gained widespread attention and ultimately gave voice to the desegregation movements that had already begun to make their presence felt. A young Baptist minister named Martin Luther King Jr. organized a wave of protests against segregation on Montgomery's public buses that lasted 382 days. The 30,000 African Americans who participated marched up to nine kilometers, and when asked how they felt, some replied: “My feet, tired. My soul, free.”

Five years later, in 1960, the United States Supreme Court declared the law regulating racial segregation on public transportation unconstitutional. That segregation was finally abolished completely in 1964 with the Civil Rights Act, which officially outlawed it, although in practice it took somewhat longer to become effective in other areas such as schools and workplaces.