In 1955, Rosa Parks was a seamstress in Montgomery, Alabama, an African-American living in a city with laws that strictly segregated blacks and whites. When Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man, she was arrested and fined. The subsequent bus boycott, led by Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., caused a national sensation that eventually led to desegregation in the United States and the civil rights movement of the 1960s. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1996.