10. Rosa Parks
Rosa Parks, a 42-year-old African American seamstress and NAACP member, became a pivotal figure in the civil rights movement on December 1, 1955, when she refused to surrender her bus seat to a white passenger in Montgomery, Alabama. Her courageous act led to the 1955-56 Montgomery bus boycott, a 381-day mass protest that resulted in the desegregation of Montgomery’s public buses. Parks’s steadfast commitment to equality and justice continues to inspire generations in the ongoing fight for civil rights and racial equality (nationalgeographic.com).
