Although many people remember Parks as a meek little old lady, she had long been a fierce civil rights activist. Parks helped advocate for the wrongly accused Scottsboro Boys. She helped defend Recy Taylor, a black woman who had been gang-raped by a group of white men, and helped bring the despicable crime to light. Just a couple of months prior to the incident on the bus, Parks had attended the famed Highlander Folk School to learn more about civil rights organizing and nonviolent direction action techniques. Parks’s refusal to move from her seat on the bus fit into a long history of her own
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