Rosa Parks, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and the Birth of the Civil Rights Movement

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On the evening of December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a 42-year-old African American seamstress and civil rights activist living in Montgomery, Alabama, was arrested for refusing to obey a bus driver who had ordered her and three other African American passengers to vacate their seats to make room for a white passenger who had just boarded.

Parks had been sitting just behind the whites-only section of the bus (the first 10 seats), but under a Montgomery city ordinance the driver was responsible for keeping white and black passengers separate and possessed “the powers of a police officer…for the purpose of carrying out” the required segregation. Upon Parks’s refusal, the driver summoned the police, who arrested her for violating the city code. Her arrest and trial galvanized Montgomery’s African American community, which organized a crippling boycott of the city’s bus system (most of its regular passengers were African American) that lasted more than a year and drew international attention to the ugly reality of Jim Crow in Montgomery and elsewhere in the South.

The boycott ended victoriously in December 1956, after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a district court decision that had declared Montgomery’s system of segregated seating unconstitutional. Parks’s courage and quiet dignity were widely admired, and her example inspired others to undertake similar nonviolent resistance to legal discrimination against African Americans throughout the country, earning her the title “Mother of the Civil Rights Movement.”