US civil-rights activist. Her refusal to surrender her seat on a bus to a white passenger and her subsequent arrest and imprisonment spurred the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, which ignited the civil-rights movement in the USA.

Most early portrayals depict her as merely a poor, tired seamstress who, on the spur of the moment, refused to surrender her seat on a bus to a white passenger. In fact, she had long been a community activist and 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 (1955-56). She earned recognition as the ‘midwife’ or ‘mother’ of the civil-rights revolution, and in June 1999 the US Congress awarded her the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian award in the country.