Rosa Parks
On December 1, 1955, Parks got onto a city bus to go home after work. She paid her 10¢ and sat down in the first row of seats behind the painted line on the floor which marked the black section. After several stops, more white passengers got on the bus. The bus driver ordered Parks and three other black people to give up their seats so the white people could sit down. The other three moved to the back of the bus, but Parks slid over to the window. She said she was following the law by sitting in the right section.  Later, she said that when she was told to go to the back of the bus, "I thought of Emmett Till and I just couldn't go back."  (Till was a black 14-year-old boy who was lynched in Mississippi about three months earlier.)