When a young African-American seamstress named Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, city bus to a white passenger, she turned the smoldering civil rights movement into a firestorm. For years, blacks in the South had seen their civil liberties stolen through segregation laws that demanded the races be kept separate but equal except there was no equality about it. Parks s arrest was chosen to challenge the constitutionality of Montgomery s bus segregation laws. Soft-spoken and unassuming, Rosa Parks was an unlikely activist. But her sense of justice inspired her to speak out against racism and injustice, regardless of the personal price it exacted. In the process, she became an enduring symbol of the power of an individual to change the course of history.