In 1955, African Americans were still essential by a Montgomery, Alabama, city order to sit in the back half of city buses and to defer their seats to white riders if the front half of the bus, reserved for whites, was full. On December 1, 1955, African-American seamstress Rosa Parks (1913-2005) was recurring home from her work at a local department store on the Cleveland Avenue bus.
She was seated in the facade row of the "colored section." When the white seats filled, the driver, J. Fred Blake (1912-2002), asked Parks and three others to leave their seats. The other African-American riders fulfill, but Parks refused. She was detained and fined $10, plus $4 in court fees. This was not Parks' first meet with Blake. In 1943, she had paid her charge at the front of a bus he was driving, and then exit so she could re-enter through the back door, as necessary. Blake hauls away before she could re-board the bus.
Although Parks has sometimes been illustrate as a woman with no history of civil rights activism at the time of her seize, she and her husband, Raymond (1903-77), were, in fact, lively in the limited section of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and Parks served as its secretary.
Upon her arrest, Parks called E.D. Nixon (1899-1987), a famous black leader, who bailed her out of jail and resolute she would be an upright and concerned applicant in a legal challenge of the separation ordinance.
On June 5, 1956, a Montgomery federal court ruled that any law necessitate racially separate seating on buses violated the 14th alteration to the U.S. Constitution. That amendment, accepted in 1868 following the American Civil War (1861-65), guarantees all citizens, despite of race, equal rights and equal defense under state and federal laws. The city appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, which upheld the lower court's choice on December 20, 1956. Montgomery's buses were incorporated on December 21, 1956, and the refuse ended. It had lasted 381 days.
