In Montgomery, Alabama on December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was
jailed for refusing to give up her seat on a public bus to a white
man, a violation of the city’s racial segregation laws.

The successful Montgomery Bus Boycott, organized by a young
Baptist minister named Martin Luther King Jr., followed Park’s
historic act of civil disobedience.

“The mother of the civil rights movement,” as Rosa Parks is
known, was born in Tuskegee, Alabama, in 1913.

She worked as a seamstress and in 1943 joined the Montgomery
chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People.

Martin Luther King Jr. (1929 – April 4)

Rosa Louise McCauley Parks  (1913 –  2005)

In Montgomery, Alabama on December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was
jailed for refusing to give up her seat on a public bus to a white
man, a violation of the city’s racial segregation laws.

The successful Montgomery Bus Boycott, organized by a young
Baptist minister named Martin Luther King, Jr., followed Park’s
historic act.  

The Rosa Parks bus at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan.

Rosa Louise McCauley Parks
(February 4, 1913 – October 24, 2005)

In Montgomery, Alabama on December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was
jailed for refusing to give up her seat on a public bus to a white
man, a violation of the city’s racial segregation laws.

The successful Montgomery Bus Boycott, organized by a young
Baptist minister named Martin Luther King, Jr., followed Park’s
historic act of civil disobedience.

The restored Rosa Parks bus as it looks today in the Henry 
Ford Museum.