The Montgomery bus boycott lasted 381 days after Rosa Parks was arrested in December 1955.
Parks was arrested on December 1, 1955, after refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger on a segregated Montgomery bus. Local activists organized a one-day boycott, but the protest continued after the Montgomery Improvement Association was formed and Martin Luther King Jr. was chosen as its president.
Black residents sustained the boycott through carpools, walking, and other transportation arrangements. The protest ended after a federal court ruling, later upheld by the Supreme Court, declared Alabama’s bus segregation laws unconstitutional. Montgomery buses were integrated on December 21, 1956.
The boycott is often remembered as King’s first major national leadership role, but it depended on years of organizing by local women, ministers, civic groups, and legal activists.