WASHINGTON, D.C. - Activist Rosa Parks was arrested in 1955 for her refusal to give up her seat to a white man on a city bus in segregated Alabama. This was a critical moment in the civil rights movement. Parks's refusal to give up her seat sparked off the Montgomery bus boycott that brought the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr to national prominence as a civil rights leader.

Rosa Parks becomes the first African American woman to be honored with a full-length statue in the Capitol's Statuary Hall. President Obama and congressional leaders unveiled a statue of Parks in Statuary Hall - the first full length statue of a black woman in the Capitol's collection.

Her statue joins a bust of abolitionist Sojourner Truth- which sits in the Capitol's Visitors Center.