President Obama helped unveil a bronze statue of activist Rosa Parks, whose 1955 refusal to give up her seat to a white man on a city bus in segregated Alabama was a pivotal moment in the civil rights movement. Parks became the first African-American woman to be honored with a full length statue in National Statuary Hall.
Changing the world is not easy and it takes times and many men and women like Rosa parks to change the world for the better.
From a great PBS article (and there's a video interview too) about a book called "The Rebellious Life of Rosa Parks" by Jeanne Theoharis, a political science professor at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York
Extract: Moreover, the Montgomery bus boycott did not transform America overnight. It took 382 days and hundreds of volunteers to force change, and that was years before the March on Washington. Parks and her husband Raymond lost their jobs and would not regain economic security until they moved far away, to Detroit. Parks would readily admit that she was hardly the first working black woman to refuse to give up her bus seat. It is important that the story get told well -- not, as "a romantic fable."
