Rosa Parks sparked our freedom movement when, on this day 55 years ago, she refused to give up her seat to a white passenger. Tired of giving in, the then secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) started a chain of events leading to the Montgomery Bus Boycott. She became an “international icon of resistance to racial segregation” and collaborated with civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr, which help launch him to prominence in the civil rights movement.
To commemorate this event, Google has a fresh new doodle up on their homepage. It features what appears to be a city bus with kids of various races exiting the bus and skipping away while holding hands. This doodle is not animated, so you’ll have to use your imagination a little.
Parks eventually received many honors ranging from the 1979 Spingarn Medal to the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Congressional Gold Medal and a posthumous statue in the United States Capitol’s National Statuary Hall. Her death in 2005 was a major story in the United States’ leading newspapers. She was granted the posthumous honor of lying in state at the Capitol Rotunda. via Wikipedia
This past October, Google used their homepage to say Happy Birthday to Dizzy Gillespie, a pioneer in bebop and jazz music with a distinctive horn and super-human cheeks.