A blog on The Henry Ford website remembers the brave decision made by Rosa Parks in 1955:

It's one of the most famous moments in modern American civil rights history: On a chilly December evening in 1955, on a busy street in the capital of Alabama, a 42-year-old seamstress boarded a segregated city bus to return home after a long day of work, taking a seat near the middle, just behind the front "white" section. At the next stop, more passengers got on. When every seat in the white section was taken, the bus driver ordered the black passengers in the middle row to stand so a white man could sit. The seamstress refused.

But theologian Michael Horton notes that this extraordinary act flowed from Rosa Parks' ordinary life of obeying and following Jesus. Horton writes:

Rosa Parks didn't wake up one day and decide to become the "first Lady of Civil Rights." She just boarded a bus as she did every day for work and decided that this day she wasn't going to sit in the back as a proper black person was expected to do in the 1950s in Montgomery, Alabama. She knew who she was and what she wanted. She knew the cost, and she made the decision to pursue what they believed in enough to sacrifice her own security. At that point, she wasn't even joining a movement. She was just the right person at the right place and time. What made her the right person were countless influences, relationships, and experiences—most of them seemingly insignificant and forgotten. God had already shaped her into the sort of person who would do such a thing. For her at least, it was an ordinary thing to refuse to sit in the back of the bus on this particular trip. But for history it had radical repercussions.