Yes, Rosa Parks refused to get up on the bus. But did you know about her work with the NAACP?
Harriet Tubman was the first woman to direct an armed expedition in the Civil War.
Tubman was hugely helpful as a spy, nurse, and cook for the Union armies during the Civil War, but her knowledge of the land was vital in the raid on Combahee River in 1863. She accompanied soldiers, putting her life on the line, during the nighttime assault that ultimately freed more than 700 slaves from South Carolina plantations.
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Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Rosa Parks tracked and investigated brutal hate crimes as secretary of the Montgomery NAACP.
Rosa Parks is famous for her refusal to leave her seat on the bus, but it wasn't a singular act of resistance. She was a key member of the Montgomery branch of the NAACP, working closely with Edgar Nixon and devoting almost all of her free time to organizing notes, handling correspondence, writing and sending press releases, and documenting racist acts of brutality, especially against black women.
She spearheaded one of the decade's strongest campaigns for justice around the case of Recy Taylor, who was gang-raped in Alabama, and delivered a critical speech against President Truman's civil rights initiatives at the 1948 statewide NAACP convention.
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Nelson Mandela co-founded South Africa's first all-black law firm with Oliver Tambo.
The friends and colleagues opened the Johannesburg firm in August of 1952, dedicated to defending those whose rights were violated by apartheid laws. "For Africans, we were the firm of first choice and last resort," Mandela wrote in his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. "To reach our offices each morning, we had to move through a crowd of people in the hallways, on the stairs, and in our small waiting room. ... It was a place where they could come and find a sympathetic ear and a competent ally, a place where they would not be either turned away or cheated, a place where they might actually feel proud to be represented by men of their own skin color."
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Zora Neale Hurston got a B.A. in anthropology in 1928 from Barnard College, where she was the only black student and the school's first black graduate.
The author of Their Eyes Were Watching God worked closely with famous anthropologist Franz Boas, and, after graduation, conducted field research on folklore and cultural practices in Florida and Haiti.
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