On this day, 1955, “the mother of the civil rights movement” Rosa Parks refused to give her seat up to a white man on a public bus in Montgomery, Alabama. At the time, it was required that African-Americans move if requested by a white individual, therefore Parks was arrested. In response, minister Martin Luther King Jr. organized a bus boycott in Montgomery that lasted more that a year, resulting in the supreme court ruling against Alabama’s bus segregation rules.

Information found on History.com.