Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat
1955 · Event
A 42-year-old seamstress and NAACP secretary, ordered to surrender her bus seat to a white passenger in Montgomery, quietly says no and is arrested. Four days later the city's Black community stops riding the buses — and a 26-year-old preacher named Martin Luther King is chosen to lead the boycott.
On these timelines: The Civil Rights Movement, USA, Women in history, Master
More from The Civil Rights Movement
- US Civil Rights Movement (1954)
- Montgomery bus boycott (1955)
- Selma to Montgomery marches (1965)
- The 16th Street Baptist Church bombing (1963)
- Birmingham campaign (1963)
- King writes the Letter from Birmingham Jail (1963)
- Freedom Summer (1964)
- The murder of Medgar Evers (1963)
Around 1955
- Vietnam War (American phase) (1965)
- Cuban Revolutionary War (1953)
- Suez Crisis (1956)
- Indian independence and Partition (1947)
- Cuban Missile Crisis (1962)
- Apartheid (1948)
- Berlin Airlift (1948)
- Chinese Civil War (resumed) (1945)
- Korean War (1950)
- Decolonisation of Africa (1952)