Today in Labor History, February 4, 1913: Rosa Parks was born in Tuskegee, Alabama. In 1943, she joined the NAACP, eventually becoming the branch secretary, where she investigated cases and organized protest campaigns around cases of racial and sexual violence. In spite of local policies to disenfranchise African American voters, she still registered to vote and did vote from 1943 on. In 1955, she refused to move to the back of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, in a planned direct action against Jim Crow, sparking the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Later in her life, she became a supporter of the Black Power Movement and an anti-Apartheid activist.

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