President Barack Obama and congressional leaders set aside their political battles at a ceremony to dedicate a statue of civil rights icon Rosa Parks (rear) Wednesday, on Capitol Hill in Washington. 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 in segregated Montgomery, Ala. Joining Obama (center) are Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (left) of Kentucky, and House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio. Parks becomes the first black woman to be honored with a full-length statue in the Capitol's Statuary Hall. A bust of another black woman, abolitionist Sojourner Truth, sits in the Capitol Visitors Center. Obama said that with the installation of the statue, Parks, who died in 2005, has taken her rightful place among those who have shaped the course of U.S. history. He said her presence in Capitol would serve to "remind us no matter how humble or lofty our positions, just what it is that leadership requires."
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