Rosa Parks Arrested for Refusing to Give Up Bus Seat Sparking Montgomery Bus Boycott

On the evening of December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a 42-year-old African American seamstress and NAACP secretary, was arrested for violating Chapter 6, Section 11 of the Montgomery City Code, which upheld racial segregation on public buses. Parks refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery city bus when the white section became full, defying driver James F. Blake’s order to move to the back. Her arrest was not a spontaneous act of defiance but a deliberate challenge to institutionalized segregation—Parks had attended a workshop on implementing integration at the Highlander Folk School that summer, and the Montgomery NAACP had been searching for a test case to challenge Alabama’s segregation laws in federal court.

Jim Crow laws mandated that African Americans could not sit in the first ten rows reserved for white passengers, had to pay their fare at the front then re-enter through the back door, and were frequently ordered to surrender their seats even in the “colored” section if the white section filled. Black passengers comprised 75 percent of Montgomery’s bus ridership, yet the city refused to hire Black drivers and subjected Black passengers to systematic humiliation and abuse. To coincide with Parks’ trial on December 5, 1955, the Women’s Political Council initiated a one-day citywide bus boycott. That evening, E.D. Nixon and other Black leaders held a mass meeting at Holt Street Baptist Church, elected 26-year-old Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. as president of the newly formed Montgomery Improvement Association, and voted to extend the boycott indefinitely.

For 381 days, African American citizens of Montgomery—comprising the vast majority of bus riders—walked, carpooled, and organized an elaborate alternative transportation system rather than submit to segregation. They endured harassment, intimidation, job losses, and violence, including the bombing of King’s home. The city of Montgomery fought the boycott with every institutional tool available: police arrested carpoolers for minor traffic violations, insurance companies canceled policies on church-owned station wagons used for transportation, and city officials obtained injunctions against the boycott. On November 13, 1956, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling that bus segregation violated the Fourteenth Amendment, and on December 20, 1956, Montgomery buses were finally integrated. The boycott demonstrated both the economic power of organized nonviolent resistance and the lengths to which Southern institutions would go to preserve white supremacy, establishing a template for mass protest that would define the civil rights movement while exposing the systematic abuse of government authority to maintain racial hierarchy.