Statue of Rosa Parks unveiled in Capitol

A bronze statue of civil rights heroine Rosa Parks was recently unveiled at the U.S. Capitol on a day for members of her African Methodist Episcopal Church to celebrate one of their own.

President Obama, capping an hour-long ceremony in Statuary Hall, recalled the desegregation of public buses in Montgomery, Alabama, after a yearlong boycott that was sparked by Parks’s simple act of defiance: refusing to move to the back of the bus.

“And with that victory, the entire edifice of segregation, like the ancient walls of Jericho, began to slowly come tumbling down,” he said before hundreds gathered just outside the Capitol Rotunda on February 27.