For 382 days, almost the entire African American population of Montgomery, Alabama, including leaders Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks, refused to ride on segregated buses. The Montgomery bus boycott was a political and social protest campaign against the policy of racial segregation on the public 1955—the Monday after Rosa Parks, The event that triggered the boycott took place in Montgomery on December 1, 1955, after seamstress Rosa Parks refused to give her seat to a white passenger on a city bus. Local laws dictated that African American passengers sat at the back of the bus while whites sat in front. Rosa Parks (1913—2005) helped initiate the civil rights movement in the United States when she refused to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery, Alabama bus in 1955. Her actions Sparked by the arrest of Rosa Parks on 1 December 1955, the Montgomery bus boycott was a 13-month mass protest that ended with the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that segregation on public buses is unconstitutional. On March 2, 1955, a black teenager named Claudette Colvin dared to defy bus segregation laws and was forcibly removed from another Montgomery bus. Nine months later, Rosa Parks - a 42-year-old seamstress and NAACP member- wanted a guaranteed seat on the bus for her ride home after working as a seamstress in a Montgomery department store. On a cold December evening in 1955, Rosa Parks quietly incited a revolution — by just sitting down. She was tired after spending the day at work as a department store seamstress. She stepped onto the bus for the ride home and sat in the fifth row — the first row of the "Colored Section." Beginning in 1955, the 13-month nonviolent protest by the black citizens of Montgomery to desegregate the city's public bus system, Montgomery City Lines. Its success led to a November 1956 Supreme Court decision overturning segregated transportation that was legalized by the 1896 Plessy v. The Montgomery Bus Boycott in Montgomery, Alabama was a crucial event in the 20th Century Civil Rights Movement. On the evening of December 1, 1955 Rosa Parks, a Montgomery seamstress on her way home from work, refused to give up her seat on the bus for a white man and was subsequently arrested. In Montgomery, Alabama on December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks is 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. “During the Montgomery bus boycott, we came together and remained unified for 381 days. It has never been done again. The Montgomery boycott became the model for human rights throughout the world.” When Rosa Parks was arrested on December 1, 1955, for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man, she was mentally prepared for the moment. On a winter's evening in 1955, a 42-year-old African-American woman named Rosa Parks, tired after a long day of work as a seamstress, boarded a bus in Montgomery, Alabama to get home. Who is Rosa Parks? Rosa Parks, born Rosa Louise McCauley on February 4, 1913, in Tuskegee, Alabama, is celebrated as a pivotal figure in the American civil rights movement. Her most notable act of defiance occurred on December 1, 1955, when she refused to yield her bus seat to a white passenger in Montgomery, Alabama. "Lawyer for Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., the Montgomery bus boycott, the Tuskegee syphilis study, the desegregation of Alabama schools, and the Selma march." The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It by Jo Ann Gibson Robinson Montgomery Bus Boycott Title: Montgomery Bus Boycott Years: 1956 1955 Description: Local authorities in Montgomery, Alabama, arrested Rosa Parks, a black seamstress, when she refused to vacate her seat in the white section of a city bus on December 1, 1955. Rosa Parks launched the Montgomery bus boycott when she refused to give up her bus seat to a white man. The boycott proved to be one of the pivotal moments of the emerging civil rights movement. For 13 months, starting in December 1955, the black citizens of Montgomery protested nonviolently with the goal of desegregating the city’s public buses. Born in February 1913, Rosa Parks was a civil rights activist whose refusal to give up her seat to a white passenger on a segregated bus in 1955 led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Rosa Parks (born February 4, 1913, Tuskegee, Alabama, U.S.—died October 24, 2005, Detroit, Michigan) was an American civil rights activist whose refusal to relinquish her seat on a public bus precipitated the 1955–56 Montgomery bus boycott in Alabama, which became the spark that ignited the civil rights movement in the United States. The Montgomery Bus Boycott officially started on December 1, 1955. That was the day when the blacks of Montgomery, Alabama, decided that they would boycott the city buses until they could sit anywhere they wanted, instead of being relegated to the back when a white boarded. The Montgomery Bus Boycott speech reprinted below is one of the first major addresses of Dr. Martin Luther King. Dr. King spoke to nearly 5,000 people at the Holt Street Baptist Church in Montgomery on December 5, 1955, just four days after Mrs. Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to relinquish her seat on a Montgomery city bus.
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