Rosa Parks, R.I.P.:

She was the perfect test-case plaintiff, a fact that activists realized only after she had been arrested. Hardworking, polite and morally upright, Parks had long seethed over the everyday indignities of segregation, from the menial rules of bus seating and store entrances to the mortal societal endorsement of lynching and imprisonment.

(snip)

"I thought back to the time when I used to sit up all night and didn't sleep, and my grandfather would have his gun right by the fireplace, or if he had his one-horse wagon going anywhere, he always had his gun in the back of the wagon," she wrote. "People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in."

I first heard of her protest years later. I couldn't have been more than seven at the time, but it stunned me that in the recent history of my country, another human being, an adult, an American, was legally required to give up her seat on a bus so that someone else could sit there, and that the only way she could protest was break the law. That probably shaped my worldview more than any other single historical event.