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 Nine months before Rosa Parks' arrest for refusing to give up her bus seat, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin was arrested in Montgomery for the same act. The city's Black leaders prepared to On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, for disorderly conduct for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man. Civil Rights leader E. D. Nixon bailed her out of jail, joined by white friends Clifford Durr, an attorney, and his wife, Virginia. 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. Earlier that summer, she attended a workshop on implementing integration at the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee. 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. Rosa Parks, an African American, was arrested that day for violating a city law requiring racial segregation of public buses. On the city buses of Montgomery, Alabama, the front 10 seats were permanently reserved for white passengers. The boycott lasted from December 1, 1955, when Rosa Parks was arrested, to December 20, 1956, when Browder v. Gayle , a Federal ruling declaring racially segregated seating on buses to be unconstitutional, took effect. On 1 December 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested in Alabama for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man. Discover how her act of defiance sparked the US civil rights movement. 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. 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. The boycott, organized by local leaders and initiated the day after Parks' arrest, lasted an unprecedented 381 days, during which the Black community united in a common cause, choosing to walk, carpool, or seek alternative transportation instead of using the segregated bus system. 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 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. Rosa Parks (center, in dark coat and hat) rides a bus at the end of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Montgomery, Alabama, Dec. 26, 1956. Don Cravens/The LIFE Images Collection via Getty Images/Getty Images. Most of us know Rosa Parks as the African American woman who quietly, but firmly, refused to give up her bus seat to a white person Dec. 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama. That small act of The National City Lines bus, No. 2857, on which Rosa Parks rode before she was arrested (a GM "old-look" transit bus, serial number 1132), is now on exhibit at the Henry Ford Museum. On the night of Parks' arrest, the Women's Political Council , led by Jo Ann Robinson , printed and circulated a flyer throughout Montgomery's black community that Rosa Parks occupies an iconic status in the civil rights movement after she refused to vacate a seat on a bus in favor of a white passenger in Montgomery, Alabama. In 1955, Parks rejected a bus driver's order to leave a row of four seats in the "colored" section once the white section had filled up and move to the back of the bus. Shortly after Parks’s arrest, Jo Ann Robinson, a leader of the WPC, and E.D. Nixon, president of the local NAACP, printed and distributed leaflets describing Parks’s arrest and called for a one-day boycott of the city buses on December 5. They believed that the boycott could be effective because the Montgomery bus system was heavily 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. When a white man entered the crowded bus, the bus driver ordered four African American passengers to stand so the white passenger could sit. Parks refused and was arrested. Parks was an active participant in the civil rights movement for several years and was well trained in civil rights activism. The boycott was sparked by the arrest of Rosa Parks, an African American woman who refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger on December 1, 1955. Also Read: Little Rock Nine Facts Parks’ act of defiance was not the first of its kind, but it gained widespread attention and became a symbol of resistance to racial segregation.
Articles and news, personal stories, interviews with experts.
Photos from events, contest for the best costume, videos from master classes.