Parks, Rosa (Louise McCauley)

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US civil-rights activist. Her refusal to surrender her seat on a bus to a white passenger and her subsequent arrest and imprisonment spurred the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, which ignited the civil-rights movement in the USA.

Most early portrayals depict her as merely a poor, tired seamstress who, on the spur of the moment, refused to surrender her seat on a bus to a white passenger. In fact, she had long been a community activist and had also been involved in previous incidents when refusing to leave a bus seat. By forcing the police to remove, arrest, and imprison her on this occasion, and then agreeing to become a test case of segregation ordinances, she played a deliberate role in instigating the Montgomery bus boycott (1955–56). She earned recognition as the ‘midwife’ or ‘mother’ of the civil-rights revolution, and in June 1999 the US Congress awarded her the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian award in the country.

Blue represents the Caribbean Sea. Yellow stands for the golden beaches. Effective date: 10 July 1973. >>