On this day in 1955, Rosa Parks ignites the beginning of the bus boycotting in Montgomery, Alabama. Parks was jailed for refusing to give up her seat in the ‘white section’ of a city bus.

According to the Montgomery city, African Americans were to sit at the back of city busses in the ‘colored section.’ Parks was in the first row of the black section when the driver demanded that she give up her seat to a white man. She refused, which caused for her to be jailed.

Learning of Parks’ arrest, the NAACP and other activists quickly went on to call for a bus boycott to be held by black citizens. The first day of the bus boycott was a great success, and that night the 26-year-old Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., told a large crowd gathered at a church, “The great glory of American democracy is the right to protest for right.” King emerged as the leader of the bus boycott and received numerous death threats from opponents of integration. At one point, his home was bombed, but he and his family escaped bodily harm.

The boycott lasted more than a year, and participants walked and carpooled to their destinations instead of taking the bus. On November 13, 1956, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Alabama state and Montgomery city bus segregation laws as being in violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. On December 20, King issued the following statement: “The year old protest against city buses is officially called off, and the Negro citizens of Montgomery are urged to return to the buses tomorrow morning on a non-segregated basis.” The boycott ended the next day. Rosa Parks was among the first to ride the newly desegregated buses.

Rosa Parks died on October 24, 2005. Three days later the U.S. Senate passed a resolution to honor Parks by allowing her body to lie in honor in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda.