Parks got married to Raymond Parks when she was 19 years old. He was a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and was the first activist she met, according to The Guardian. She started attending the meetings and worked as the chapter's secretary.

Shortly after that, she met Ed Nixon (a labor organizer) and started attending the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, famous for hosting activist meetings. In 1955, Parks returned to Montgomery, where she worked as a seamstress and deiced to catch a bus after work on one historic day. She did not intend to stage a protest that day, though — it just happened. During an interview with Pacifica Radio, she said (via Daybreak of Freedom: The Montgomery Bus Boycott), "The driver said that if I refused to leave the seat, he would have to call the police. And I told him, 'Just call the police.'"

Her arrest triggered the historic Montgomery bus boycott, and Parks was part of the executive board of directors of the group behind it. On February 21, 1956, Parks was arrested a second time for her organizational role in the boycott (via History).

After being arrested again, Parks lost her job and moved to Detroit, where she was an essential member of the Black Power movement. She was 95 years old when she died in 2005, and she was the first African-American woman to lie in state in the Capitol rotunda (via Find a Grave).

Parks was arrested two times during her life.

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