Rosa+Parks-Dabeach

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks lefet her job as a seanstress in Montgomery, Alabama, and boarded a bus to go home. In 1955, busses in Montgomery reserved seats in the front for whites and seats in the rear for African Americans. Seats in the middle were open to African Americans, but only if there were few whites on the bus. Rosa Parks took a seat just behind the white section. Soon, all of the seats on the bus were filled. Whe the bus driver noticed a white man standing, he told Parks and three other African Americans sitting on her row to get up and let the white man sit down. The other three African Americans rose, but Rosa Parks did not. The driver then called theMontgomery police, who took Parks into custody. News of her arrest reached E.D. Nixon, a former president of the local chapter of the NAACP. Nixon wanted to challenge bus segregation in court, and told Parks that they might just break it with her case. When Rosa Parks agreed to challenge segregation in court, she did not know that her decision would spark a new era in the civil rights movement. Within days of the arrest, African Americans had organized a boycott of the bus system. Mass protests soon erupted across the nation. After decases of segregation and inequality, many African Americans had decided the time had come to demand equal rights.

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