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On December 1, 1955, Rosa Louise McCauley Parks, a 42-year-old black seamstress, took her usual bus ride home from work in Montgomery, Alabama. She sat in the front of the "colored section" on the city-run bus. But Jim Crow ordinances required black passengers to give up their seats and move to the rear if the white section of the bus had become full when additional white passengers came on board.
When a white man could not find a seat in the white section, the bus driver demanded that Mrs. Parks move to the rear. She said, "No."
Mrs. Parks, who died this October at the age of 92, was arrested and fined. This startling and courageous act prompted a 381-day boycott of the Montgomery bus system by the city's black population. The boycott was led by a 26-year-old preacher named Martin Luther King Jr. The boycott propelled him...