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WASHINGTON (AP) - Civil rights activist Rosa Parks is taking her place among American historical figures in the U.S. Capitol.

President Barack Obama and top leaders in Congress are scheduled Wednesday to help unveil a 9-foot likeness of Parks in Statuary Hall.

Parks helped invigorate the civil rights movement in December 1955 when she refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man. The act of defiance led to a bus boycott that lasted a year and eventually helped desegregate Montgomery, Ala., city buses.

But decades before and after, she actively worked to bring about racial justice by pressing for voting rights and investigating sexual assaults of black women by white men.