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Born February 4, 1913, in Tuskegee, AL
Died October 24, 2005, in Detroit, MI
Rosa Parks, an NAACP activist since 1943, refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus in 1955. Her silent defiance spoke for a whole people. Her arrest sparked a 381-day bus boycott, which ignited the civil rights movement. Fired from her tailoring job, she moved to Detroit, Michigan, where she was a special assistant to Congressman John Conyers for 25 years. She was the founder and president of the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development, inaugurated in 1988. She received the Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Legislative Achievement Award of 1990 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1996.