Mischaracterized as a simple woman who chose not to stand because she had tired feet, often Parks’ long history of activism is erased from our collective consciousness. Parks served as an active member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People beginning in the early 1940s, working on a voter registration campaign, leading the local NAACP Youth Council, and attending a leadership conference organized by civil rights visionary, Ella Baker. It would be Parks’ work as a young activist in the NAACP that would lead her to investigate a horrible incident of abduction and rape that had taken place in her hometown of Abbeville, Alabama…

Just weeks before her arrest, Parks attended a workshop at the Highlander Folk School, an egalitarian, interracial institution founded in the nineteen-thirties as a training ground for union activists, which became an important center for civil rights activists. At the workshop, attendees were asked to think about what they could do as individuals to challenge the inequalities faced by African Americans in the South. Parks found her answer on Montgomery’s segregated buses just a few weeks later.