On Dec. 1, 1955, Rosa Parks defied the segregationist Jim Crow laws of the time and refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus for a white male passenger.
Though she wasn't the first to disobey the city's laws, her act of resistance, 60 years ago today, came to be a definitive symbol of the civil rights movement and set off a bus boycott that lasted for over a year. It culminated in the Supreme Court's 1956 decision to end segregation on public buses. In a statement to an Associated Press reporter in the courtroom, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called the decision "a glorious daybreak to end a long night of enforced segregation."
Parks, who died at the age of 92 in Detroit, was a lifelong activist who had been a member of the NAACP for a decade before her now historic act of resistance.
“I was not tired physically,” she wrote in her biography, correcting the myth that she refused to give up her seat because her feet were tired. “No more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in."
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