President Obama presided over a ceremony in Washington on Wednesday unveiling a statue of the late civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks. On Dec. 1, 1955, Parks refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Her act of resistance led to a 13-month boycott of the Montgomery bus system that would help spark the civil rights movement.

President Obama: “She lived a life of activism, but also a life of dignity and grace. And in a single moment, with the simplest of gestures, she helped change America and change the world. Rosa Parks’ singular act of disobedience launched a movement. The tired feet of those who walked the dusty roads of Montgomery helped a nation see that to which it had once been blind. It is because of these men and women that I stand here today. It is because of them that our children grow up in a land more free and more fair, a land truer to its founding creed.”

(For more on the life of Rosa Parks, watch the Democracy Now! hour-long special on Rosa Parks with historian Jeanne Theoharis, author of the new biography, “The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks.”)