Rosa Parks 1913-2005 Rosa Louise McCauley Parks was an African American civil rights activist and seamstress whom the U.S. Congress dubbed the "mother of the modern-day civil rights movement." Parks is famous for her refusal, on December 1, 1955, to obey a bus driver's demand that she give up her seat to a white passenger. Her subsequent arrest and trial for this act of civil disobedience ignited the Montgomery Bus Boycott, one of the largest and most successful mass movements against racial segregation in history, and catapulted Martin Luther King, Jr., one of the organizers of the boycott, to the forefront of the civil rights movement. Her role in American history earned her an iconic status in American culture, and her actions have left an enduring legacy for civil rights movements worldwide.