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. 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 (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 Rosa, discharged from Montgomery Fair department store, began setting up rides and garnering public support for the boycott and the NAACP. For three hundred and eighty-one days, African American citizens of Montgomery walked, carpooled, and took taxis rather than city buses. The Montgomery bus boycott was a political and social protest campaign against the policy of racial segregation on the public transit system of Montgomery, Alabama. It was a foundational event in the civil rights movement in the United States. Rosa Parks rode at the front of a Montgomery, Alabama, bus on the day the Supreme Court's ban on segregation of the city's buses took effect. A year earlier, she had been arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a bus. A diagram of the Montgomery bus where Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat was used in court to ultimately strike down segregation on the city’s buses. The Montgomery bus boycott made King a national civil rights leader and charismatic symbol of black equality. 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. Rosa Parks is best known for refusing to give up her seat on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955, which sparked a yearlong boycott that was a turning point in the civil rights The story of Rosa Parks as a radical activist and believer in self-defense and Black Power; of the Women’s Political Council that started the boycott and of the many women who came before Mrs. Parks; and of the development of King’s profound vision of nonviolent resistance through the aid of his brilliant new mentor, Bayard Rustin who as a gay man was forced to stay in the shadows. 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. There were 8 key events during the Montgomery Bus Boycott: The Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) was created on 1st December in response to Rosa Parks' arrest. The MIA's chairman was Martin Luther King. The boycott started on 5th December, 1955 - the day of Rosa Parks' trial. 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. "Chronicles the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott sparked by Mrs. Rosa Park's refusal to give up her seat to a white male, describing the plans and problems of a nonviolent campaign, reprisals by the white community, and the eventual attainment of desegrated city bus service." The Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 to 1956 was a pivotal chapter in civil rights history. American civil rights activist Rosa Parks (center) rides a bus at the end of the Montgomery bus 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 On December 1, 1955, a single act of defiance by Rosa Parks against racial segregation on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus ignited a year-long boycott that would become a pivotal moment in the Civil Rights Movement. The Montgomery Bus Boycott, led by a young Martin Luther King Jr., mobilized the African American community in a collective stand against injustice, challenging the deeply entrenched Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy. 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. In December 1955, Rosa Parks' refusal as a Black woman to give up her seat on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama, sparked a citywide bus boycott. That protest came to a successful conclusion
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