Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955 after refusing to give up her bus seat.
On December 1, 1955, Parks was riding a Montgomery city bus home from work when the driver ordered her row to move back for a white passenger. She refused to comply and was arrested under the city’s bus-seating rules. She was convicted four days later, fined $10, and charged an additional $4 in court costs.
Parks was an experienced civil-rights activist and secretary of the Montgomery NAACP, not simply a tired passenger acting spontaneously. Her arrest helped trigger the Montgomery bus boycott, organized by Black community leaders including Martin Luther King Jr. The boycott lasted more than a year and ended after the Supreme Court upheld a ruling declaring segregated bus seating unconstitutional.
Claudette Colvin and several other Black women had also been arrested for resisting Montgomery bus segregation before Parks. Parks became the best-known figure because her case helped galvanize the successful boycott, while Colvin later became one of the plaintiffs in Browder v. Gayle.