Rosa Parks became a civil rights icon for refusing to give up her bus seat, but it led to personal and financial hardship for years.

When Rosa Parks refused to move from her bus seat to give it to a white passenger on December 1, 1955, police in Montgomery, Alabama arrested her. While she wasn’t the first person to use a bus sit-in to protest segregation — Bayard Rustin’s is the earliest one I’m aware of — Parks’ arrest was the catalyst for the Montgomery bus boycott and turned her into a civil rights icon.