Civil-rights activist, born in Tuskagee, Alabama, USA. After briefly attending Alabama State University, she married and settled in Montgomery, AL, where she gained employment as a tailor's assistant in a department store (1955). Contrary to most early portrayals of her as merely a poor, tired seamstress, who on the spur of the moment refused to surrender her seat in a bus to a white passenger, she had long been a community activist. She had previously served as secretary of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and had worked for the Union of Sleeping Car Porters. She had also been involved in previous incidents when refusing to leave a bus seat. By forcing the police to remove, arrest, and imprison her on this occasion, and then agreeing to become a test case of segregation ordinances, she played a deliberate role in instigating the Montgomery bus boycott (1955–6). Dismissed from her job at the department store, in 1957 she became a youth worker in Detroit, MI, working to help house the homeless. In 1965 she joined the staff of black Congressman John Conyers Jr, for whom she worked until her retirement in 1988. She eventually earned recognition as the ‘midwife’ or ‘mother’ of the civil rights revolution and became a sought-after speaker nationally. In 1999 she received the Congressional Gold Medal of Honor.
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