Rosa Louise McCauley was born on February 4, 1913, in Tuskegee, Alabama. She grew up in Pine Level, raised by her grandparents after her parents separated.

From a young age, Rosa saw Jim Crow laws everywhere — rules that said Black Americans had to use separate schools, water fountains, restaurants, and buses. Her grandfather stood on the porch with a shotgun to protect their home from the Ku Klux Klan.

Rosa's grandmother told her: "You are just as good as anyone else." She believed it. And she never forgot it.

Montgomery's buses had a rule: Black passengers had to sit in the back. The front rows were for white passengers only. If the bus got full, Black passengers had to give up their seats — even if no white passenger was standing.

Rosa Parks was not just a tired seamstress. She was a trained civil rights activist. She had been secretary of the Montgomery NAACP for 12 years. She had studied nonviolent resistance at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee. She knew exactly what she was doing on December 1, 1955.

Rosa boarded the Cleveland Avenue bus after a long day of work as a seamstress. She sat in the first row of the "colored" section.

When the bus filled up, driver James Blake told Rosa and three other Black passengers to move back so a white man could sit. The others moved. Rosa did not.

"People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. The only tired I was, was tired of giving in." — Rosa Parks

The night Rosa was arrested, Jo Ann Robinson — a professor and NAACP leader — stayed up all night and printed 52,500 flyers and passed them through the city. The message was simple: "Don't ride the bus to work, to town, to school, or any place Monday, December 5."

On Monday morning, the buses were empty. 40,000 Black residents walked, carpooled, rode mules, and stayed home. The boycott lasted 381 days.

On November 13, 1956, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Browder v. Gayle that bus segregation was unconstitutional. The community had won.

Rosa Parks did not stop after the boycott. She continued fighting for justice for the rest of her life. She worked with Congressman John Conyers for 23 years, helping people in need.

In 1996, President Clinton awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom — the highest honor a civilian can receive. In 1999, she received the Congressional Gold Medal.

Rosa passed away on October 24, 2005. She became the first woman in American history to lie in honor in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda.

Just like Rosa Parks had a perspective shaped by her experiences, AI systems are shaped by the data and choices people make when building them.

When a story leaves out important facts, or focuses only on one person's point of view, it can create a biased picture. The "tired woman" story leaves out that Rosa was a strategic activist.

Perspective is the lens through which someone sees the world. Rosa's perspective was shaped by decades of injustice. An AI's perspective is shaped by the data it was trained on.

In a Harkness table talk, you speak directly to each other — not just to the teacher. Use these sentence stems to join in: