(CNN) — Rosa Parks will be honored with a new statue in downtown Montgomery, Alabama, on Sunday, 64 years to the day she was arrested for refusing to move to the back of a city bus.
Sunday marks the second annual Rosa Parks Day in Alabama, after the state legislature approved the day honoring the civil rights icon last year.
Events were slated to take place throughout the city of Montgomery this weekend, including the dedication of a statue of Parks on Sunday afternoon.
Rosa Parks was on her way home from work on December 1, 1955, when she refused to give up her seat on a public bus for a white man.
Her subsequent arrest prompted the 381-day boycott of the Montgomery bus system, organized by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
A later ruling by the Supreme Court desegregated public transportation in Montgomery, but it wasn’t until the 1964 Civil Rights Act that all public accommodations were desegregated nationwide.
Her small act of defiance made Parks a major symbol of the civil rights movement. She died in 2005 at the age of 92.
