A Seat, a Boycott, a Name

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

By the time Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, the legal foundation of segregation had already cracked. The Supreme Court had ruled school segregation unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, overturning the separate-but-equal doctrine it had upheld since Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. Parks's arrest, and the boycott of the Montgomery bus system that followed through 1955 and 1956, turned that legal opening into a sustained campaign that ordinary residents could join simply by refusing to ride. The boycott succeeded, and its success did something the legal victory alone had not: it made the boycott's spokesman, a young minister named Martin Luther King Jr., a nationally known figure almost overnight. What Montgomery demonstrated, and what the movement kept demonstrating over the following decade, was that a legal ruling and a mass campaign reinforced each other, the court supplying the principle and the boycott supplying the proof that ordinary people would act on it.