Rosa Parks Refuses to Give Up Her Seat

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a 42-year-old seamstress and NAACP secretary in Montgomery, Alabama, refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a city bus, violating the city's segregation ordinance. She was arrested and fined. Her act of defiance was not spontaneous — Parks was a trained activist — but its impact was transformative. The Black community of Montgomery organized a boycott of the city bus system that lasted 381 days, led by a young pastor named Martin Luther King Jr. The boycott ended when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled bus segregation unconstitutional in Browder v. Gayle (1956). Parks's quiet courage became a founding moment of the civil rights movement. Congress later called her "the first lady of civil rights" and "the mother of the freedom movement."