On 1 December 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama. This single act of nonviolent resistance sparked the Montgomery bus boycott, an eleven-month struggle to desegregate the city’s buses. Under the leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr., the boycott resulted in a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that public bus segregation is unconstitutional and catapulted both King and Parks into the national spotlight.
Born in Tuskegee, Alabama, on 4 February 1913, Rosa Louise McCauley grew up in Montgomery and was educated at Alabama State College. In 1932, she married Raymond Parks, a barber and active member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Parks, too, became active in the NAACP and was hired as secretary of the local chapter in 1943. By the late 1940s, she was named secretary of the Alabama State Conference of NAACP branches, and it was through this position that Parks came into contact with a number of civil rights leaders such as Ella Baker, A. Philip Randolph, and Roy Wilkins.
In 1954, Parks reorganized the NAACP Youth Council. Under her guidance, youth members challenged the Jim Crow system by checking books out of white libraries and sitting in the white section of buses. The summer before her arrest, Parks traveled to Tennessee’s Highlander Folk School to attend a workshop titled “Racial Desegregation: Implementing the Supreme Court Decision.” It was there that she was inspired by Septima Clark, who had recently become head of Highlander’s innovative education program.
When Parks was arrested on 1 December 1955, she was not the first African-American to defy Montgomery’s bus segregation law. Nine months earlier, fifteen-year-old Claudette Colvin was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger; but her subsequent pregnancy made some black leaders hesitant about mobilizing support for her. In October, eighteen-year-old Mary Louise Smith was arrested under similar circumstances; this case also failed to mobilize Montgomery residents. Parks's arrest, on the other hand, elicited a strong reaction from leaders in Montgomery who had been waiting for the right incident to launch a protest. "She was morally clean and she had fairly good academic training," NAACP local branch leader E. D. Nixon explained. "Now she wasn't afraid and she didn't get excited about anything. If there ever was a person that would have been able to break the situation that existed on the Montgomery City Line, Rosa L. Parks was the women to use."
While news accounts later depicted Parks as a tired seamstress, Parks explained: "People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that is not true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of the day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in."
Parks's actions inspired 42,000 black citizens to boycott the Montgomery city buses for nearly a year. During that period, Parks served as a dispatcher to coordinate rides for protesters and was indicted, along with King and eighty-seven others, for participation in the boycott. Her second arrest attracted additional national press coverage to Montgomery.
The Montgomery bus boycott culminated with the U.S. Supreme Court's Browder vs. Gayle ruling that segregation on city buses is unconstitutional. In addition to putting King and the civil rights struggle into the national spotlight, the success in Montgomery created a model for challenging segregation in the South with nonviolent protest. Following the boycott victory, Parks continued to face harassment from segregationists and moved to Detroit in 1957. She was an active supporter of civil rights causes until her death in October 2005 at the age of 92.