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.
DNA, United States National Archives and Records Service, National Archives Library, Washington, D.C.