On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks, a Black woman, refused to obey an order by bus driver James F. Blake to give her seat up to a white passenger. Her action was seen as contravening the racial segregation laws for busing, and she was arrested by the local police. Rosa Parks' move subsequently sparked the massive Montgomery Bus Boycott.

Montgomery, Alabama had briefly been the capital of the Confederate States of America during the Civil War. It was also representative of how racial segregation was implemented. Four days after the incident, Martin Luther King, Jr. organized 55,000 Black people to hold a boycott in the city, calling on them to "[withdraw] our cooperation from an evil system, rather than merely withdrawing our support from the bus company". After more than a year of effort, a federal district court finally ruled that Alabama's law on municipal bus racial segregation was unconstitutional. On December 20, 1956, Martin Luther King, Jr. announced the end of the 381-day boycott.

Rosa Parks later recalled in her autobiography "My Story": "People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was 42. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in."

Although the bus strike was of limited success and did not achieve the purpose of comprehensive desegregation, it had an inspirational effect on Black people across the United States, and launched future large-scale social movements by African-American people fighting for their civil rights.

References: BBC; Peopo Citizen Journalism; "My Story"