Rosa Parks was an American civil rights activist who is best known for her pivotal role in the Montgomery bus boycott. She was born on February 4, 1913, in Tuskegee, Alabama, and died on October 24, 2005, in Detroit, Michigan . Parks became an NAACP activist in 1943 and participated in several high-profile civil rights campaigns. On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Parks refused to vacate a row of four seats in the “colored” section of a bus in favor of a white passenger, once the “whit