December 1

On December 1, 1955, a Black seamstress named Rosa Parks boarded a bus in Montgomery, AL and took a seat in the middle of the bus, behind the white-only section. A few stops later, the driver told Parks to give her seat to a white passenger and move farther back. When she refused, she was arrested.

Local Black activists announced a one-day bus boycott, then decided to keep it going to achieve improvements for Black passengers. This included abolishment of the requirement that they surrender their seats to whites on crowded buses.

The boycott committee’s leader, Martin Luther King Jr., thought an agreement could be reached within a few days. However, the city administration and the bus company refused to budge, and the boycott stretched into months.

With the Brown decision as an encouraging precedent, the committee filed suit seeking complete desegregation of the buses.  The case made its way to the Supreme Court — which on November 13, 1956 — declared Alabama’s bus-segregation laws unconstitutional. It was another giant stride toward equality for Black Americans.

Footnote:

• Editors of Time-Life Books, Events that Shaped the Century, “1955 The Montgomery Bus Boycott,” p. 123.