In Montgomery, Alabama, on December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was jailed for refusing to give up her seat on a public bus to a white man, a violation of the city’s racial segregation laws. The successful boycott of the Montgomery buses, organized by a young Baptist pastor named Martin Luther King, Jr., followed Park’s historic act of civil disobedience.
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“The mother of the civil rights movement,” as Rosa Parks is known, was born in Tuskegee, Alabama, in 1913. She worked as a dressmaker and in 1943 joined the Montgomery chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ( NAACP).
According to a city of Montgomery ordinance in 1955, African Americans were required to sit in the backs of public buses and were also required to cede those seats to white riders if the front of the bus filled up. Parks was in the front row of the black section when the white driver asked him to give way to a white man. Parks’ refusal was spontaneous but was not simply caused by his tired feet, as popular legend has it. In fact, local civil rights leaders had been planning to challenge racist Montgomery bus laws for several months, and Parks had been aware of that discussion.
Learning of Parks’ arrest, the NAACP and other African-American activists immediately called for a boycott of buses by black citizens on Monday, December 5. The news was spread through leaflets and activists formed the Montgomery Improvement Association to organize the protest. The first day of the bus boycott was a great success, and that night Reverend Martin Luther King, 26, told a large crowd gathered in a church: “The great glory of American democracy is the law. to protest for the right. King became the leader of the bus boycott and received numerous death threats from opponents of integration. At one point, his house was bombed, but he and his family escaped bodily harm.
The boycott lasted for over a year, and participants carpooled or traveled miles to work and school when no other way was possible. Because African Americans previously made up 70 percent of Montgomery’s bus ridership, the municipal transportation system suffered severely during the boycott. On November 13, 1956, the United States Supreme Court struck down the state of Alabama and city of Montgomery laws on bus segregation because they violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. American. On December 20, King issued the following statement: “The year-long protest against city buses is officially called off, and black citizens of Montgomery urged to return to buses tomorrow morning without segregation. The boycott ended the next day. Rosa Parks was among the first to use the newly desegregated buses.
Martin Luther King, Jr., and his nonviolent civil rights movement had won their first major victory. There would be many more to come.
Rosa Parks passed away on October 24, 2005. Three days later, the United States Senate passed a resolution honoring Parks by allowing her body to rest in honor in the rotunda of the United States Capitol.
READ MORE: Milestones in the Civil Rights Movement
