On December 1, 1955, an African American seamstress named Rosa Parks took a seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Local segregation laws required her to yield that seat should a white passenger demand it, and when she refused to honor just such a demand, she found herself arrested. This simple act of defiance sparked a yearlong protest that forced the city to give up its racist practices in its public transportation. More significant, however, Parks had energized the civil rights movement across the country and ushered in a decade of agitation that would bring an end to much of the legalized racial discrimination in America.

In 1990, admirers of Parks organized a celebration commemorating her part in the civil rights movement, and she was asked to sit for this portrait by Artis Lane. Descended from runaway slaves, the Canadian-born Lane has done several likenesses of Parks, including one depicting her as she must have appeared while riding the bus that fateful day in 1955.