- Rosa Parks
On December 1, 1955, a young black seamstress named Rosa McCauley Parks refused to give up her seat and move to the back of an Alabama bus.
Her subsequent arrest led to a year-long bus boycott in Alabama and was a catalyst for the civil rights movements in the United States.
But her action also cost her and her husband Raymond their jobs and earned them death threats. The couple eventually moved to Detroit, Michigan.
Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick of Washington, D.C., once noted: "Mrs. Parks set an example that showed that a simple, ordinary person with courage and a sense of her own dignity as a child of god could make such an enormous difference in the modern history of our country."
Mrs. Parks died October 24, 2005, at age 92.
- Little Burgundy Book, Diocese of Saginaw