Rosa Parks’s arrest in Montgomery, Alabama, helped launch the 1955–1956 Montgomery bus boycott.
On December 1, 1955, Parks refused to surrender her seat to a white passenger after the bus’s driver ordered her and three other Black passengers to move. She was arrested under Montgomery’s segregation laws. Her action followed years of civil-rights organizing and was not an isolated spontaneous protest, although it became an especially powerful symbol.
The Women’s Political Council, led by Jo Ann Robinson, helped distribute thousands of leaflets calling for a bus boycott. Local ministers and activists then formed the Montgomery Improvement Association, choosing Martin Luther King Jr. as its president.
The boycott lasted 381 days. It ended after the Supreme Court affirmed that bus segregation was unconstitutional. Parks later moved to Detroit and worked for Congressman John Conyers. She is often called the “mother of the civil rights movement,” but many other Montgomery activists also sustained the campaign.