Rosa Parks was born on February 4, 1913 in Tuskegee, Alabama. Parks died in Detroit, Michigan, on October 24, 2005. We celebrate the civil rights icon on February 4, which would have been her 107th birthday.

Rosa Parks was anything but a one-dimensional figure who one day opted to stand up for her humanity on the back of a Montgomery, Alabama, bus on December 1, 1955. While her action did become one of the biggest sparks to move the civil rights movement to the attention of white Americans, the work was being done on the grassroots level years before. In 1943 Parks joined the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP, serving as secretary to NAACP President E.D. Nixon until 1957, as well as the chapter’s youth leader. Prior to the bus boycott, she worked tirelessly as an NAACP investigator on the rape of Recy Taylor, a young Black woman who was brutally raped by a group of white men in Alabama.

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