She helped spark the Civil Rights Movement. When she refused to surrender her seat to a white passenger, Blake was the one who called the police and had her arrested. She avoided the driver for more than 10 years until one day she boarded his bus without paying attention. Instead of waiting for her to get back in, Blake drove away once Parks was off the bus. In 1943, she boarded a bus driven by Blake and, after she paid her fare, he told her to exit and re-enter through the back doors-a rule for Black riders using the segregated bus system. Parks’s first conflict with James Blake, the bus driver who reported her to the police in 1955, occurred more than a decade earlier. The bus driver who had Parks arrested in 1955 had given her trouble before.

Representative John Conyers, where she helped find housing for unhoused people. After moving from Alabama to Detroit, Parks worked as an assistant to U.S. Part of her duties included traveling across the state and interviewing victims of discrimination and witnesses to lynchings. In 1943, she joined the Montgomery, Alabama, chapter of the NAACP and served as its secretary until 1956. Parks's fight for equal rights for Black Americans didn’t start with her fateful arrest. She received her diploma in 1933, making her part of the mere 7 percent of Black Americans at the time to earn the distinction. When she was 19 years old, Parks’s husband, Raymond, urged her to complete her high school education. Though Rosa Parks enjoyed school, she dropped out at age 16 to take care of her dying grandmother. Rosa Parks finished high school at a time when that was rare. Here are some facts worth knowing about the icon, who was born in Tuskegee, Alabama, on February 4, 1913. But it isn’t the only thing she should be remembered for. That quiet act of defiance helped kick-start the Civil Rights Movement and made Parks a household name. On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks solidified her place in the history books by refusing to give up her bus seat to a white passenger-an arrestable offense in then-segregated Montgomery, Alabama.

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