Rosa Parks refuse to move from her seat in the white section of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama because of a combination of fatigue and principle.
“I was quite tired after spending a full day working,” the seamstress explained about her action on Dec. 1, 1955, which touched off the famous bus boycott and ushered in the modern civil rights movement.
In addition, Parks was already active in the NAACP and had decided to stand up to segregation.
As she put it, the question in her mind was “when and how would we ever determine our rights as human beings?”