Rosa Louise McCauley Parks

- Rosa Louise McCauley Parks

(February 4, 1913 – October 24, 2005)

was an African-American civil rights activist, whom the U.S. Congress

called "the first lady of civil rights" and

"the mother of the freedom movement".

On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama,

Parks refused to obey bus driver James F. Blake's order that she give up her seat in the colored section to a white passenger, after the white section was filled.

Parks was not the first person to resist bus segregation. Others had taken similar steps in the twentieth century

- Freedom Riders were civil rights activists

who rode interstate buses into the segregated southern United States

in 1961 and

following years to challenge the non-enforcement of the United States Supreme Court decisions Irene Morgan v. Commonwealth of Virginia (1946) and

Boynton v. Virginia (1960),

which ruled that segregated public buses were unconstitutional.

The Southern states had ignored

the rulings and

the federal government

did nothing to enforce them.

- The Little Rock Nine

were a group of African American students

enrolled in Little Rock Central High School

in 1957.

Their enrollment was followed by the Little Rock Crisis,

in which the students were initially prevented from entering the racially segregated school

by Orval Faubus, the Governor of Arkansas.

They then attended after

the intervention of President Eisenhower.

In Little Rock, the capital city of Arkansas,

the Little Rock School Board

agreed to comply with the high court's ruling.

Virgil Blossom, the Superintendent of Schools,

submitted a plan of gradual integration to the school board

on May 24, 1955,

which the board unanimously approved.

The plan would be implemented during the fall of the 1957 school year,

which would begin

in September 1957.

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