Rosa Parks in Montgomery, after her arrest, in 1955.

MONTGOMERY — It was 60 years ago today, Dec. 1, that a simple act of civil disobedience galvanized the Civil Rights Movement.

In 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a White man on a public bus in Montgomery, Ala. Police arrested the seamstress for violating the city’s racial segregation laws. Those laws required African-Americans to sit in the back of public buses and mandated that they give up those seats to Whites if the front seats were full.

Parks’ refusal sparked a year-long boycott of the buses — a movement organized by a 26-year-old Baptist minister named Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Supreme Court eventually struck down the Alabama and Montgomery laws as being in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

A little more than a year after the incident, the boycott ended and Rosa Parks was among the first to ride the newly desegregated buses.

Source: WTHR