ALABAMA: Rosa Parks

Rosa Parks was an activist long before she refused to give up her seat. Getty Images

Rosa Parks, born in Tuskegee, Alabama, was an activist long before she refused to give up her seat for a white rider in 1955 — she was the secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP.

"People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired," she wrote in her autobiography, "but that isn't true. I was not tired physically … No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in."

Her arrest sparked a bus boycott, and, as a result, the Supreme Court ruled bus segregation unconstitutional in 1956.