Rosa Parks

Evening rush hour, 1 December 1955

During the evening rush hour in Montgomery on 1 December 1955, Rosa Parks boarded a Cleveland Avenue bus and sat in the first row immediately behind the ten seats permanently reserved for white passengers.

When the bus became crowded, driver James F. Blake ordered Parks and the other three Black passengers in her row to vacate it, so that a white passenger would not have to sit beside a Black passenger. The other three moved; Parks remained seated.

Parks maintained that she was not occupying a white-reserved seat.

Chapter 6, Section 11

Blake summoned police, and Parks — 42, a seamstress and secretary of the Montgomery NAACP since 1943 — was arrested under Chapter 6, Section 11 of the Montgomery City Code.

Police processed and fingerprinted her. E. D. Nixon and Clifford and Virginia Durr went to the jail, and Parks was released that night on a $100 bond.

The paperwork outlived the bus

The arrest records and a hand-drawn diagram of her seat survive because they became evidence in the federal case Browder v. Gayle — which was brought in the names of Aurelia Browder, Susie McDonald, Claudette Colvin and Mary Louise Smith, not Parks.

The familiar photograph of Parks being fingerprinted was taken after a different arrest, in February 1956. By the day after this one, Jo Ann Robinson and the Women's Political Council were circulating notices for the boycott that began on 5 December and ran 381 days.