The Story
One evening, on December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, a seamstress was riding home on a Montgomery bus. When the bus driver instructed her to move back from her seat, she refused, and quietly started a revolution. This woman was Rosa Parks, that day she was arrested for violating a city law requiring racial segregation of public buses.
The front ten seats of the Montgomery city buses were reserved for white passengers. The diagram shows Rosa Parks was seated in the first row behind the ten seats reserved for white people. The bus became crowded and the bus driver instructed Rosa and three other African American passengers to abandon their seats for the white passengers boarding. Rosa stayed seated while the other three passengers moved, she argued that she was not in a seat reserved for whites. Joseph Blake, the bus driver, thought he had the ability to move the line separating black and white passengers. The law was foggy on this point, but Rosa refused to move yet again and the driver called the police. Two officers, Day and Mixon, came and quickly arrested her. Rosa Parks was booked, fingerprinted, and briefly incarcerated when she was in police custody. The police report shows she was charged with "refusing to obey orders of bus driver." In result of openly challenging the racial laws of her city, Rosa was in great physical risk while being held by the police, her family was terrified for her. When she was able to call home she spoke to her mother, whose first question was "Did they beat you?" (2) In
Rosa Parks' arrest opened an opportunity for the African American community to organize a bus boycott in protest of the discrimination they had endured. This boycott involved Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr., they led the "well-coordinated, peaceful boycott that lasted 381 days" and "captured the world's attention." (2)