Parks isn't the first African American woman arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat in Montgomery

One of the most interesting facts about biography of Rosa Parks is she was not the first African American woman to be arrested for refusing to yield her seat on a Montgomery bus. Colvin was the first person arrested on a Montgomery bus for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger. (Parks was involved in gathering cash for Colvin's defense.) Before Parks, three other African American women—Aurelia Browder, Mary Louise Smith, and Susie McDonald—had also run afoul of the bus segregation statute. The four were plaintiffs in the Browder v. Gayle case, in which the Supreme Court declared bus segregation to be unconstitutional.

Colvin was the first person arrested for breaking Montgomery's bus segregation regulations, but her acts were rapidly eclipsed when Rosa Parks became the face of the Montgomery bus boycotts a year later.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott lasted 381 days and didn't finish until the city's segregation law was abolished. In the end, the shift came about not because of the Parks lawsuit, which was postponed by appeals, or because of the bus company's financial problems, but because of a U.S. Supreme Court verdict in Browder v. Gayle, which declared the segregation legislation unconstitutional.

Rosa saw the bus as a specific symbol of inequity. She had seen white youngsters take the bus to school while she and her classmates had to walk to school when she was a child.