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f you're going to make "forever" stamps, it's hard to go wrong by invoking Rosa Parks' long-lasting legacy.On Monday, the United States Postal Service began to issue their new Parks stamps -- called forever stamps because their rates never change -- to honor the civil-rights figure, who died in 2005. The stamp shows a portrait of Parks painted by Thomas Blackshear II. Monday would have been her 100th birthday.
In 1955, in Montgomery, Ala., Parks -- then 42 years old -- refused to give up her seat on a city bus so that a white man could sit down. This broke the law; buses at that time were segregated. She was arrested.
A 381-day bus boycott began, led by a charismatic young Baptist minister named Martin Luther King Jr. Parks appealed her charge, and the U.S. Supreme Court soon ruled bus segregation unconstitutional. The modern civil-rights era had begun, and Parks would become known as its "accidental matriarch."
Some consider this view of Parks oversimplified, a view presented in a new book by Jeanne Theoharis, released last week, called "The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks."