Civil rights movement

=== Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott, 1955–1956 ===
{{Main|Rosa Parks|Montgomery bus boycott}}

[[File:Rosa Parks being fingerprinted by Deputy Sheriff D.H. Lackey after being arrested for refusing to give up her seat for a white passenger on a segregated municipal bus in Montgomery, Alabama.jpg|thumb|[[Rosa Parks]] being fingerprinted after being arrested for not giving up her seat on a bus to a white person.]]

On December 1, 1955, nine months after a 15-year-old high school student, [[Claudette Colvin]], refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a public bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and was arrested, [[Rosa Parks]] did the same thing. Parks soon became the symbol of the resulting Montgomery bus boycott and received national publicity. She was later hailed as the "mother of the civil rights movement".<ref>J. Mills Thornton III, "Challenge and Response in the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955–1956." ''Alabama Review'' 67.1 (2014): 40–112.</ref>

Parks was secretary of the Montgomery NAACP chapter and had recently returned from a meeting at the [[Highlander Research and Education Center|Highlander Folk School]] in Tennessee where nonviolence as a strategy was taught by [[Myles Horton]] and others. After Parks' arrest, African Americans gathered and organized the Montgomery bus boycott to demand a bus system in which passengers would be treated equally.<ref name="ReferenceA">{{cite book |last1=Chafe |first1=William Henry |title=The Unfinished Journey: America since World War II |date=2003 |publisher=Oxford University Press |isbn=978-0-19-515049-0 |url=https://archive.org/details/unfinishedjourne0000chaf|url-access=registration }}</ref> The organization was led by Jo Ann Robinson, a member of the Women's Political Council who had been waiting for the opportunity to boycott the bus system. Following Rosa Parks' arrest, Jo Ann Robinson mimeographed 52,500 leaflets calling for a boycott. They were distributed around the city and helped gather the attention of civil rights leaders. After the city rejected many of its suggested reforms, the NAACP, led by [[Edgar Nixon|E. D. Nixon]], pushed for full desegregation of public buses. With the support of most of Montgomery's 50,000 African Americans, the boycott lasted for 381 days, until the local ordinance segregating African Americans and whites on public buses was repealed. Ninety percent of African Americans in Montgomery partook in the boycotts, which reduced bus revenue significantly, as they comprised the majority of the riders. This movement also sparked riots leading up to the [[1956 Sugar Bowl]].<ref>{{Cite news | last = Thamel | first = Pete |author-link=Pete Thamel | title = Grier Integrated a Game and Earned the World's Respect | newspaper = New York Times | date = January 1, 2006 | url = https://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/01/sports/ncaafootball/01grier.html | access-date=April 15, 2009 }}</ref> In November 1956, the United States Supreme Court upheld a district court ruling in the case of ''[[Browder v. Gayle]]'' and ordered Montgomery's buses desegregated, ending the boycott.<ref name="ReferenceA" />

Local leaders established the Montgomery Improvement Association to focus their efforts. [[Martin Luther King Jr.]] was elected President of this organization. The lengthy protest attracted national attention for him and the city. His eloquent appeals to Christian brotherhood and American idealism created a positive impression on people both inside and outside the South.<ref name="Robinson 1986" />