Rosa Parks Refuses to Give Up Her Seat, and Montgomery Boycotts the Buses

What happened

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a 42-year-old seamstress and NAACP member, was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white passenger. Local Black leaders, organized as the Women's Political Council, had already been building a case against bus segregation; Parks's arrest gave them the plaintiff and the moment. The Montgomery Improvement Association formed to run the boycott and elected a 26-year-old pastor, Martin Luther King Jr., as its president. Roughly 90 percent of Montgomery's Black bus riders, who made up over 70 percent of the system's patronage, stayed off the buses starting December 5, sustained by a carpool system of about 300 cars. The boycott lasted 381 days until the Supreme Court's November 13, 1956 ruling that Alabama's bus segregation laws were unconstitutional forced the city to desegregate its buses.

How we know

The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford documents the boycott's day-by-day organization from MIA records and King's own papers, and the National Park Service records the Supreme Court ruling date and the 70 percent ridership figure.

Sources

• The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University. Montgomery Bus Boycott · Reputable sourcekinginstitute.stanford.edu · The domain "kinginstitute.stanford.edu" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
• National Park Service. The Montgomery Bus Boycott · Primary source (author-declared)nps.gov · Cited as a "primary" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)