A name that went down in history, and a woman that will forever be honored for her strength as a black woman; she became the face of the civil rights movement. This remarkable woman has the passion to fight racial injustice within her blood, being that she had slavery in her ancestry..

It was the 1st of December in 1955, Rosa Parks had finished a long day at her seamstress job and she had boarded the Cleveland Avenue bus for her ride home.

Parks took one of the first seats in a row designated for the colored. A line was drawn segregating the whites and the blacks on all buses.  If anyone were to try to disobey that line the bus driver has the authority to have the rider arrested.

On this day the bus begin to fill up, and some white people standing in the asle. It was common for the bus driver to bring the the segregation line back to push back the blacks and make seats for the whites.

The bus driver did just that on this fateful day, forcing the black people in that row to stand and move back.

Three moved. But Parks did not, and she single handedly made a passionate statement against racial injustice. She stood her ground because she was tired from work, and she was tired of giving in to society’s standards.

The bus driver called the policed and had her arrested due to this action. She was arrested on the charge of violation of Chapter 6, Section 11 of Montgomery code, later that night she was released on bail.

On the day of her arrest E.D. Nixon had already been arranging for a bus boycott but that was what got the movement going.

Rosa Parks’s action of not standing up and giving up her seat started the Montgomery Bus Boycott where blacks took cabs or mainly just walked to where they needed to go to. They refused to give their money to the buses.

Many African Americans joined this boycott, making it very successful.

The boycott was working; buses were parked empty in the transit company lots but this success was not without resistance.

Black churches were burned,  E.D. Nixon’s and Dr. Martin Luther King’s homes were both destroyed by bombings.

Yet African Americans persisted even with the hate they were receiving; the progress they were making was too monumental to stop.

This protest worked its way up all the way to the supreme court for them to help the movement and rule that Montgomery lift its segregation rule  public buses.

The protest that started on December 5, 1955 was all due to Rosa Parks standing her ground, and she ultimately served the black community in the best way possible.

Rosa Parks – the woman who started one of the largest and most successful mass movements against racial segregation.