She was a passively resistant activist, and one of her most famous acts of defiance was her refusal to get up out of her seat for a white person on the bus on December 1st 1955.
Before the incident that got her arrested – but played a very big part, and went on to stop segregation laws in the south, making her an international icon of resistance to racial segregation – happened, Rosa Parks was a seamstress (when the boycott began) but she was an educated woman.
She was on the bus and when ordered to give up her seat refused