Rosa Parks Refuses to Give Up Her Seat — Montgomery Bus Boycott Begins

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery, Alabama city bus and was arrested, an act of deliberate civil resistance that triggered the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The 381-day boycott, led by the young Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., ended with the Supreme Court ruling bus segregation unconstitutional and launched the modern civil rights movement. Parks, an experienced NAACP organizer, had long been active in civil rights work and was not acting spontaneously.