There's a street corner in Montgomery, Alabama, where two defining moments in American history took place. On one side of the street, in 1955, a small, black woman named Rosa Parks boarded one of the city's public buses. If she had glanced over her shoulder as she stepped on to the bus, she would have seen the Winter Building, a rather grand-looking antebellum affair where, in 1861, the newly elected president of the Confederate States of America, Jefferson Davis, sent a telegram to his forces in Charleston, South Carolina, ordering them to open fire on the union garrison at Fort Sumter.

It was the action that started the American civil war. Four years later, slavery in America was abolished, but nearly a century on, many black Americans living in the Deep South felt that precious little had changed. Reconstruction had merely swapped slavery for segregation, and many black Americans in Montgomery felt that the greatest indignity of all was the segregation that existed on the city's buses. Who knows what was in Parks's mind as she boarded her bus home that night in 1955 after a long day at the department store where she worked as a seamstress.

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