This photograph of an almost empty bus was taken during the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

This diagram shows where Rosa Parks was sitting when she refused to give up her seat to a white passenger. It was an exhibit in the Browder v. Gayle court case, which challenged Montgomery and Alabama laws requiring segregated seating on buses. On June 5, 1956, a Federal three-judge panel ruled that such laws violated the 14th Amendment. Later that year, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the decision.

Text adapted from “The Arrest Records of Rosa Parks” in the May/June 1999 National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) publication Social Education.

In 1955, a 42-year-old seamstress touched off a 381-day boycott of the Montgomery, Alabama, bus system when she was arrested for failing to yield her seat to a white man. This is the record of Rosa Parks’s arrest. A few days later, she was fined $10 plus $4. for court costs. A 26-year-old unknown minister, Martin Luther King, Jr., emerged as the leader of the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

Text adapted from “The Arrest Records of Rosa Parks” in the May/June 1999 National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) publication Social Education.

This fingerprint card of Rosa Parks was produced in association with her arrest for refusing to obey orders of a bus driver on December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama.

It comes from the civil suit Browder vs. Gayle filed in U.S. District Court, challenging the constitutionality of the Montgomery and Alabama segregation laws. The plaintiffs in the case were Aurelia Browder, who was forced to give up her seat on a Montgomery city bus on April 29, 1955; Claudette Colvin, who had been arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a bus on March 2; and two other women, Mary Louise Smith and Susie McDonald. Their arrests, along with Rosa Parks's in December, inspired Montgomery’s black community and the Women’s Political Council to plan the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

The U.S. District Court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs. The Supreme Court upheld the lower court’s decision, legally ending racial segregation on public transportation in the state of Alabama and ending the Montgomery Bus Boycott after 381 days.

This memorandum is from the Director of Public Information, Office of the Attorney General.

On March 2, 1955, Claudette Colvin, refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, city bus and was arrested. One month later on April 29, Montgomery resident Aurelia Browder was forced to give up her seat on a city bus, inspiring Montgomery’s black community and the Women’s Political Council to begin planning a boycott.

Months later, on December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a sexual assault investigator for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), boarded a Montgomery city bus and was arrested for not giving up her seat. Following Parks’s arrest, JoAnn Robinson, President of the Women’s Political Council, distributed 50,000 fliers calling for a daylong bus boycott. The Montgomery Bus Boycott began on December 5 and continued for 381 days.

Colvin and Browder along with two other women, Mary Louise Smith and Susie McDonald, became plaintiffs in the civil suit Browder vs. Gayle filed in U.S. District Court, challenging the constitutionality of the Montgomery and Alabama segregation laws (the buses operated by the City of Montgomery were privately owned).

In this judgment, a three-judge court composed of Richard T. Rives, Seybourn H. Lynne, and Frank M. Johnson, Jr. found that "the enforced segregation of Negro and white passengers on motor buses operating in the City of Montgomery violates the Constitution and laws of the United States."

The Supreme Court upheld the lower court’s decision, legally ending racial segregation on public transportation in the state of Alabama and ending the Montgomery Bus Boycott.